Technical information
The calendars that follow are the end-products of archival research done in Rome between 1977 and 2013, first in the Propaganda Fide Archives, secondly, in the Vatican Secret Archives more recently, in the Archives of the Holy Office. A few calendars of lesser importance were added along the way based on research done in the Archives of the Vicariate of Rome, the library of the Waldesian Faculty of Theology and the Vatican library.
Many researchers were involved in this long term undertaking – their names are to be found in the list that follows – and numerous adjustments had to be made as we moved forward and the archive holdings explored grew in number and in variety, adjustments concerning, on the one hand, the description of the documents calendared, on the other, the visual presentation of the calendars as such in line with the nature, the dimensions and the particular features of some of the holdings explored. There was also the problem of the language in which the calendars would be made available. It had been decided from the start that our researchers would be free to use either of the two official languages of Canada. Then we looked at the possibility of having all the texts translated from one language to the other, which was the case with Luca Codignola’s Calendar covering the holdings of the Propaganda Fide Archives for the period 1622-1799. But this first experience made us aware of the high cost of such an undertaking and we had to give it up for lack of funds. This said, we remain confident that this should not cause a major problem for most of the researchers who will access our Website. All along the list of calendars featured in the General Table of Contents that follows, we indicate for each calendar the language in which it has been written.
As they progressed in their work, our researchers were confronted with a variety of other problems among which legibility of certain Texts, the translation in French or English of certain technical terms proper to the ecclesiastical or curial vocabulary, also the identification of persons or places that were not always correctly spelled. They did not always succeed in solving these problems, which explains the presence here and there of question marks accompanying the translation of terms or the correction of names they propose. We would appreciate receiving from the users of the present calendars any suggestion that might help us go further than we have been able to do up to now.
To save space and avoid tedious repetition a certain number of acronyms and/or abbreviations have been used by our researchers. They are to be found at the beginning of their calendars.
To access each one of these calendars, one needs to start by examining the General Table of Contents which exists both in English and in French. This Table furnishes a detailed description of the contents of each calendar, indicating in each case the language in which it has been written.
Upon clicking a specific title, one is connected with the contents of the calendar corresponding to the said title. One can always return to the General Table of Contents by clicking this title which appears at the bottom of the screen.
One can find at the end of certain calendars, indexes of proper names. These indexes are indicated in the General Table of Contents.
For the time being, digitized copies of the documents described in the calendars are not available.
A project to that effect exists and we hope to be able to bring it to fruition in the not too distant future. Meanwhile, one can contact the Roman institutions concerned to obtain copies of the documents of one’s interest.
One may print on paper or in PDF format parts of the present calendars. But we would appreciate that in each case the rights of the authors of each one of the calendars be respected.