Foundational Christian Texts, at Your Fingertips

Paulist Press: Ancient Christian Writers provides students and scholars online access to the full text of the 75-volume Ancient Christian Writers series (see full title list). The collection includes seminal works by major Christian theologians from the late-biblical and patristic periods, including St. Augustine, Origen, Tertullian, and St. Irenaeus of Lyons, translated from Latin or Greek into English. These letters, homilies, biblical commentaries, and theological treatises are described by Bloomsbury (2025) as “the major writings from which the development of later Christian doctrine stems.”

Product Overview/Description

Ancient Christian Writers is part of Bloomsbury’s Theology & Religion Online platform, which hosts content covering theology, biblical studies, and religious studies. Collections on the platform, which contain scholarly reference sources, monographs, and audiovisual content, among other types of material, include the T&T Clark Theology Library, T&T Clark Jesus Library, Library of Catholic Thought, Bloomsbury Religion in North America, the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary and Commentaries, Eerdmans Bible Commentaries and Digital Reference Library, and the T&T Clark Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism. Libraries can bundle collections to best support the needs of their students and faculty.

User Experience

Users who have previously accessed content from other Theology & Religion Online collections will find the clean and user-friendly interface familiar and easy to navigate; new users will quickly learn it.

From the collection home page (Figure 1) users can browse the list of works by author and then by title (Figure 2).

Once a title is selected, bibliographic information is displayed, along with a brief description/abstract and the book’s table of contents (Figure 3). The text can be explored through links in the table of contents (Figure 4). Alternatively, the user can search within the book. The search results show the search terms within the context of the surrounding text, making it easy to quickly identify relevant matches (Figure 5).

The text is displayed in a plain black font against a white background, along with an image of the book cover and bibliographic information (Figure 6).

A search box at the top of the page allows users to search across all collections on the Theology & Religion Online platform. The search results include matches from any title in any collection included in the library’s subscription.

Although I find this cross-collection searching to be very valuable, it can cause some confusion when users think they are only searching within a single title or collection.

To save items for later viewing, a user can create a personal account (which they can also use to access other Bloomsbury platforms, such as Bloomsbury Cultural History or Bloomsbury Food Library).

Saved items can be organized into folders, and citations can be emailed or exported. Users can also save searches (Figure 7).

Bloomsbury Publishing aims to comply with Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (version 2.2) for all products on the Bloomsbury Digital Resources platform. A Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA) review of Bloomsbury’s Drama Online Platform (part of Bloomsbury Digital Resources) conducted in January 2022 identified three major issues: the use of images of text, rather than real text, on the homepage; the misuse of lists and headings; and the incorrect implementation of ARIA roles and attributes. Of these, the Bloomsbury Digital Resources December 2024 VPAT (which covers all of Bloomsbury’s online resources, including Theology & Religion Online) shows that the first two are only partially resolved. The VPAT does not address the third issue. The VPAT also identifies a number of other areas in which Level A or Level AA compliance is only partially supported

Contracting and Pricing Provisions

Bloomsbury’s license agreement allows users to access the platform’s content online and to save or print out single copies of portions of the licensed work. Links to platform content may also be included in electronic course packs and content management systems for courses offered for academic credit, as long as access is restricted to authorized users (e.g., current students/faculty/staff). Text and data mining are prohibited without prior written consent. For academic libraries, a single copy of an electronic original of an individual document may be shared through interlibrary loan for research or private study, but not for commercial use.

MARC and KBART records are available to be downloaded from the Theology & Religion Online website. COUNTER 5 usage reports are also available via an administrator portal.

Libraries can subscribe to Ancient Christian Writers or purchase the collection for perpetual access. Pricing depends on the institutional category and FTE. For perpetual access, the price ranges between $4,659 to $18,635, plus an annual hosting fee of $200–600 after the first year. Annual subscriptions range from $389–$3,106. Consortial discounts may be available.

Authentication Models

Access is provided through IP-authentication (such as EZproxy); Shibboleth and Open Athens are also supported.

Competitive or Related Products

I am not aware of any products that offer content similar to Ancient Christian Writers. Bloomsbury’s Theology & Religion Online platform offers several collections that dovetail well with this resource, including Paulist Press: Classics of Western Spirituality Pre-1500 and Paulist Press: Classics of Western Spirituality Post-1500. Another complementary resource is Bloomsbury’s Library of Catholic Thought, which includes several volumes of The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of The Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325.

Critical Evaluation

Paulist Press: Ancient Christian Writers is an excellent addition to the Theology & Religion Online platform. The interface is easy to navigate, and the ability to search either within this collection or across all collections to which the institution subscribes is appealing. Libraries interested in this content are likely to already own it in print, so the main advantages of the resource are the unlimited online access and searchability. The pricing seems reasonable, especially compared to similar products.

It is disappointing that accessibility issues flagged in 2022 were not resolved by 2024, despite the vendor’s acknowledgement of the need for improvement. This resource would be strengthened if the interface were upgraded to fully meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA.

Recommendation

Paulist Press: Ancient Christian Writers will primarily be of interest to academic libraries with strong collections in religious studies or theology, including seminary libraries, and to upper-level undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and researchers. Since these libraries are likely to already own this content in print, this resource may be particularly useful to institutions with distance education programs or those that offer a significant number of online classes. For libraries that already subscribe to collections hosted on the Theology & Religion Online platform, Ancient Christian Writers offers an appealing complement to their existing content.

References

Bloomsbury Publishing. (2024, September 20). Accessibility. https://www.theologyandreligiononline.com/accessibility

Bloomsbury Publishing. (2024, December 10). Accessibility conformance report international edition. https://res.cloudinary.com/bloomsbury-publishing-public/image/upload/00_Supplementary%20materials/VPAT/VPAT2.5_BloomsburyDigitalResources.pdf

Bloomsbury Publishing. (2025). Ancient Christian Writers (75). Theology & Religion Online. https://www.theologyandreligiononline.com/custom-browse?docid=AncientChristianWriters

Library Accessibility Alliance. (2022, January 3). Bloomsbury Drama Online. https://libraryaccessibility.org/evaluation/bloomsbury-drama-online