And here it is: a digital edition-in-progress of the correspondence of Carolus Clusius, the most famous botanist of the sixteenth century. After years of assembling transcriptions in archives and books, preparing them for digitization, importing images, standardizing metadata, and struggling with copyright in the digital world, Huygens ING can now present the first official release online.

Wait, edition-in-progress? Is it not ready yet? No, it is not. And maybe it will never be. But we hope that by making available what we have now (information on all 1600 letters, scans of some 1170 letters, and raw transcriptions of almost 1000 letters) we shall encourage research and engage new Clusius fans who would like to become involved in this ongoing project. In the end we hope to arrive at a perfect scholarly edition, but for now, you can use the current transcriptions with all its particularities and inconsistencies, which are explained in the introduction. We hope you enjoy reading, browsing and searching these fascinating letters. And of course, we hope that you, or your students, join the Clusius Community 2.0 in order to enrich this edition!

15 December 2015