The Newton Project is proud to announce the most extensive publication of Newton's personal and theological material that has ever taken place. The latest release, consisting of about two hundred thousand words of text and nearly a thousand images, brings together substantial amounts of previously unpublished Newton material from a number of major scholarly institutions in Europe and the US.

With the Newton Project Release 3.02 full or partial transcriptions from six early notebooks are now available, including two items that Newton began to annotate in his adolescence. These, the Trinity College personal notebook and the
Fitzwilliam Museum notebook, contain gems such as all the financial incomings and outgoings from his period as a student, and the famous list of all the sins he had ever committed up to 1662. Another stunning document (the Pierpont Morgan notebook) contains early jottings from contemporary practical manuals, and betrays the textual sources for much of Newton's early mechanical prowess. As with the Cambridge University Library texts mentioned in the following paragraph, we are currently negotiating for funding to place high quality colour images of the mss alongside the transcriptions.

Equally remarkable are the notes from a different notebook at Trinity College that he entitled 'Certain Philosophical Questions' (CUL Add. Ms. 3996 a and b). These detail the earliest beginnings of his work on optics and the theory of matter, leading to his momentous discovery that white light is heterogeneously composed of more basic primary rays, each with its own specific index of refraction. Coupled with a slightly later essay from another notebook at Cambridge University Library (CUL Add. Ms. 3975), the texts contain accounts of early experiments on vision in which he pushed various implements (such as a toothpick, a piece of brass and his own finger) right to the back of his eye-socket, in order to test how colour vision takes place. For good measure, we have added images of all of Newton's printed optical correspondence from the 1670s Philosophical Transactions, alongside transcriptions of the same correspondence.

The amount of text made available in the release of theological texts has meant that we have divided them up, as in the case of Keynes 5, into separate files. The theological notebook, now at King's College, Cambridge (the first file), dates from a slightly later period than the other notebooks, but provides an extraordinary window into the genesis of Newton's deeply heretical theological views. The astonishing version of 'Paradoxical Questions' from the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles (the first file) tells of how the true religion was extirpated by the Catholic Church in the fourth century after Christ, and gives ample evidence of Newton's views of deviant sexual and religious practices. These are the most substantial Newton theological documents ever published.

Finally, the Newton Project presents all the Newton-related private papers of the great economist John Maynard Keynes, who bought nearly all the alchemical and personal papers of Newton after they were sold at Sotheby's in July 1936. Not only do they show Keynes's own magnanimity in acquiring these texts for the nation, but they also reveal the sources he used to compile his paper 'Newton the Man', which drew attention to the extent of Newton's alchemical interests and which was first published in 1946.

We would be grateful for any constructive comments about the content and structure of the site.

Rob Iliffe
Editorial Director
The Newton Project
http://www.newtonproject.ic.ac.uk/