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Furnace and Fugue is a digital edition of Michael Maier’s (1568-1622) opus magnum, the emblem book Atalanta fugiens (1617/18) in which Latin and German texts are paired with images and musical fugues in an enigmatic way to engage users of the book in deep meditation on alchemical subjects. The digital edition of the text itself, including an English translation based on a 17th century manuscript, is accompanied by a number of scholarly essays. A main feature is the MEI player, which includes a piano roll visualisation that allows users to experience the musicological makeup of Atalanta fugiens even without a background in music theory. The edition is a beautifully designed “haute couture” edition, intended to provide an example for the future of digital scholarly publishing. The project has used digital editing effectively to enable the multimedia experience that Michael Maier had likely envisioned for Atalanta fugiens. but which was previously inaccessible to most users of the book.

Perseus Digital Library is a well-established Digital Humanities project providing a library of out-of-copyright editions of canonical world literature with a focus on the Classical languages while expanding its scope beyond its original field. Apart from being a text collection, Perseus also provides a plethora of tools for the analysis of its text material and builds upon a sound base of methodological grounding. The digital library is made up of one main collection (Greek and Roman materials) and several smaller sub-collections spanning a range of other subjects. Data acquisition is achieved semi-automatically. The contents of the library consist of out-of-print text editions, dictionaries and commentaries being enriched by the supply of digital tools for analysis. Perseus Digital Library is reviewed as a whole but a special focus of the review lies on the Greek and Roman sub-collection and sub-projects.