About ScholaThomistica

There is a growing rediscovery of Scholastic theology: not only in universities, but even non-academics are learning Latin because they want to know what great Scholastic authors like Suárez, John of St. Thomas, Billuart, or the Salmanticenses had to say.

The riches are there. The difficulty is access. Any Thomist knows where to read St. Thomas online, but the wider Scholastic tradition is much harder to reach. Many works survive only as scans in Google Books, the Internet Archive, or similar collections.

Reading scans can be done, and many people who love these texts do it gladly. But it is not a good reading experience. Tiny type, difficult typography, weak search, unreliable OCR, and awkward quotation all raise the barrier of entry higher than it needs to be.

Perhaps some publisher will eventually commission a translation of some of these works and produce a nice printed edition. After this long process, the text will be available, but often at such a cost that reading these works becomes a luxury when it really should not be.

These works are part of the public domain. Truth is a common good, and the original texts should be freely available in a form people can actually read, search, cite, and share.

ScholaThomistica aims to be the central hub of Scholasticism in the digital age.

ScholaThomistica is a free digital library of Scholastic texts, beginning with theological works by authors such as Cajetan, Bañez, John of St. Thomas, Billuart, and the Salmanticenses.

The first step is simple and ambitious: build the most comprehensive digital library of Scholastic texts in the world, with an interface that is pleasant enough for real reading and precise enough for serious study.

A good digital library should not feel like a warehouse. It should let readers move through a work naturally, compare translations, quote reliably, and help repair the text when they notice a mistake.

The answer is technology. AI can accelerate transcription and translation, and the internet allows these texts to reach anyone in the world with a connection.

ScholaThomistica uses AI in service of human flourishing, not as a replacement for human care. Vision language models can help turn public-domain scans into digital Latin texts. Translation tools can help make those texts more approachable.

But this cannot be solved by AI alone. Scholastic books contain dense abbreviations, old typography, specialized vocabulary, inconsistent spelling, and arguments that need careful attention.

• dense abbreviations (q., art., resp.)
• ligatures that no longer exist
• inconsistent spelling
• highly specialized Latin vocabulary

The result is often text that looks plausible at first glance, but contains errors that make it unreliable for serious use.

ScholaThomistica is built around a simple idea:

reading and correcting should not be separate activities.

You read a text.
You notice a mistake.
You suggest a correction.
An admin reviews it.
Once accepted, the text is updated.

That alone would already improve the library.

But there is a second layer:

Each accepted correction, paired with the original scan, becomes training data. If the scan says dupliciter and the model wrote duplex, the correction improves that passage and teaches the system what to do better next time.

Every contribution does two things:

• improves the specific text being read
• improves the system that will process the next texts

The goal is a gradual process where:

• the corpus becomes cleaner
• the tools become better
• and new texts can be brought in faster

ScholaThomistica depends on people who love these texts enough to transcribe, translate, correct, and preserve them. Many are already doing that work in isolation. The aim here is to make that effort cumulative.

If you have transcriptions, translations, or corrections you would like to share openly, read the contributor guide.

These works belong to the public domain.

They are not owned by this platform, and they are not meant to be locked inside it.

All texts are:

• freely accessible
• freely downloadable
• open to reuse

If someone wants to take the texts and build something else with them, they are free to do so.

The goal is access, not control. Truth does not belong to a single individual.

I built ScholaThomistica because the texts I wanted to read were not available in a form I could easily work with.

They existed, but not in a way that made them usable:

• not searchable
• not reliable enough to cite
• not easy to navigate

And this seemed like a solvable problem.

Things do not need to remain the way they have been: either stuck in uncomfortable scans, or waiting years for an expensive printed translation. We now have tools that can help, provided they are joined to the attention of people who genuinely care about these works.

Hi — I’m Julio Alonzo.

This is an independent project, built in my own time.

If you:

• find an error
• want to contribute
• or would like to help digitize a text

you can reach out at contact@scholathomistica.com.