Welcome to the Digital Beehive, an interactive resource for studying a commonplace book from late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Philadelphia.
Francis Daniel Pastorius began writing this manuscript in 1696 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and he continued to expand it until his death in 1719. Pastorius was a German immigrant to America, a Lutheran Pietist and admirer of the Quaker faith, a friend of William Penn, and an early abolitionist. He was also an ecological thinker and a utopian planner who attempted to link the natural world to the world of humanism in which he had been trained.
Dedicated to his sons, the Beehive manuscript is a compendium and digest of knowledge including inscriptions; epitaphs; proverbs; poetry; Biblical citations; theological citations; quotations; a list of books he read or knew; copies of letters; and notes on science, useful herbs, and other plants.
This website provides two major opportunities for readers of Pastorius’s manuscript. Under the “Contents” tab in the top bar, readers can find an interactive table of contents that allows them to read through digital facsimiles of every page in the manuscript, following the order of pages and division of sections from Pastorius’s original text. Following the manuscript’s twentieth-century restorers, our presentation of the digitized manuscript divides the main text into Volume 1 and Volume 2, in addition to the digitized Octavo Index.
The other major way for readers to use this website is to explore our annotated version of Pastorius’s Alvearium, a section of his commonplace book that provides detailed, encyclopedic entries that discuss thousands of topics of interest to Pastorius. Users of the Digital Beehive can navigate the two sections of the Alvearium, which include an alphabetically ordered section and a numerically ordered section by entry under the “Browse Entries” tab. Our annotations of each entry link readers to cross-references within each Alvearium entry, as well as to entries’ appearances within Pastorius’s Octavo Index. For more information on the purpose of the Alvearium, as well as Pastorius’s protocols for organizing and indexing entries, see our preface to the Digital Beehive project. The Digital Beehive also has a search function that allows users to find annotated entries from the Alvearium by searching for their topics.
The original, handwritten Beehive is in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts at University of Pennsylvania. But using this website, anybody can peruse, study, and teach this vast book. For a more comprehensive account of the manuscript and the uses of the website, please visit the project’s About page. To learn more about our protocols for annotating the Alvearium, please visit our data model page. Our code and raw data sets can be found here.
Support for this project has been provided by the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts.