The paper introduces the Corpus of early written Latvian ‘SENIE’
(16th -18th cc.). This corpus provides access to texts which are scattered across
different libraries and archives and which therefore have not been much investigated. The corpus is an important resource for linguists (whom is the main user community at the moment), but it can also provide some knowledge in culture and social studies.
The corpus-building methodology is presented, giving insight into the enrichment of the variety of text registers by adding shorter texts: individual texts
such as occasional poetry, Latvian texts found in sources written in other foreign languages, and shorter texts in Latvian appended to some individual Latvian sources.