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The Archives of the Pontifical Irish College, Rome.
Our aims
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To preserve those College records which warrant preservation as archives.
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To ensure that appropriate arrangements are made for public access to
archives, fostering scholarship and contacts with the wider community.
Holdings
Institutional
We do not acquire documents, as a rule,
that are not created during the daily running of the College, and the bulk of
our holdings are therefore collections arising from the College administration.
These are the most important collections:
The Register Book of students at
the College, begun in 1826 during Michael Blake's rectorship, gives information
of a general registry type (name, birth, parentage, schooling), as well as their
academic and ecclesiastical career at College. In a few cases, the "annotations"
also give information about the further careers of students.
The
17th - 18th century
Manuscripts, beginning with the year of foundation 1628,
spanning the period of the Jesuit administration of the College and the short
period before the suppression of the College during the French occupation of
Rome 1798. They consist of correspondence relating to the foundation and early
administration of the College, an early history of the College (now published -
see
http://www.irishcollege.org/irishcollrm.htm),
financial accounts, generally circulated documents of the period. The volumes
are now being archivally listed for publication. See also John Hanly "Records of
the Irish College, Rome, under Jesuit administration" in Archivium Hibernicum
xxvii (1964) 13-75.
The several series of Rectors'
Correspondence, starting in the year 1821, and open to the year 1977, are of
great value for the 19th-and early 20th-c. historian or
biographer (in parentheses the years for which correspondence is extant beyond a
period of rectorship):
Paul Cullen
(1821-) 1832-1849 (-1879) (Archbishop of Armagh 1849, Archbishop of Dublin 1852,
Cardinal 1866)
Tobias Kirby
(1836-) 1850-1891 (-1895) (titular Archbishop of Ephesus 1885)
Michael Kelly 1891-1901 (Coadjutor
Archbishop of Sydney 1901)
William Murphy 1901-1905
Michael O'Riordan 1905-1919
John Hagan (1904-) 1919-1930
Michael J.Curran (1920-) 1930-1939
Denis McDaid 1939-1951
Donal Herlihy 1951-1964
Dominic Conway 1965-1968
Eamonn Marron 1968-1980
Digital copies of parts of the collections
of correspondence of
Rectors Cullen and
Kirby are now viewable
on the internet by
registration.
The students' Manuscript Journal,
compiled by academic year and covering most of the years 1917-2000, as well as
the Irish equivalent Irisleabhar na Gaeilge 1917-1919.
Photographs
(both institutional and non-institutional): for the period pre-dating 1939 (up
to McDaid's rectorship) we have five photograph albums (c.280 items) and
around 350 loose photographs.
Non-institutional
Of those collections not connected with
the administration of the College, the following three are the most consulted:
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Seventy volumes of transcripts of mostly 17th-and 18th-century
documents from the archives of the Propaganda Fide (now the
Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples); these were selected for
transcription in the early 20th century on the basis of their
interest for Irish history. While not a substitute for visiting the
repository, it can give at least an entry to their collections.
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Five volumes of (formerly loose-leaf) 19th-century copies of
texts in Irish (heroic tales as from the Fiannaíocht;
historic texts as from Foras Feasa).
See the published list
covering four volumes: Pádraig Ó Fiannachta "Láimhscríbhinní Gaeilge Choláiste
na nGael sa Róimh" Studia Celtica 3 (1968) 53-65.
For
other information about our holdings concerning the history of the College
itself, and particularly our 17th and 18th-century
manuscripts dating you may consult John J.Hanly's "Sources of the History of the
Irish College, Rome" Irish Ecclesiastical Record 102 (1964) series 5,
28-34, as well as the abovementioned Manuscript History.
Searching the archives
The Register Book and
correspondence series are in chronological order. However, our catalogues for
the rectors' correspondence are handwritten or typescript and lack indexes. This
means that you may have to search our catalogues when you visit us. The
situation is being remedied by current cataloguing and a digitisation project
(see below).
Should your query concern the rectorship
of Tobias Kirby, please start your search with three articles published by
Patrick Corish in Archivium Hibernicum vols. Xxx (1972 p.29-116), xxxi
(1973 p.1-94) and xxxii (1974 p.1-62) – though not comprehensive, this is an
archival catalogue in its own right.
Visiting us
Before visiting us, we ask you to contact
us, by phone, e-mail or post, to arrange your visit. Apart from the casual
family history request, researchers will be asked to procure a letter of
reference from their institution. You will be asked to sign our
rule for consultation of original documents.
Contacting the archivist
E-mail:
archives@irishcollege.org
Post:
Archivista
Pontificio Collegio Irlandese
Via SS.Quattro 1
00184 Roma
Phone: 0039-06-77263 ext. 408, or the
reception ext. 1
Bearing in mind that most of our
researchers are Irish and cannot easily visit us, we will do our best to find
the documents you are looking for, but we ask you to provide as many details as
possible; e.g. the full name and title of the person your research centres on,
and a particular year, or a short succession of years where documents may be
found.
Reprographics
We impose a photocopying fee of € 0.50/
sheet. However, do not provide photocopies of photographs or of any documents
predating 1800; in some cases we cannot provide photocopies, depending on the
requirements of copyright laws and on other preservation concerns.
Current projects
Cataloguing:
we are currently cataloguing the correspondence series of Rectors O'Riordan
and Hagan; the latter will have a fully searchable index.
Digitisation:
Thanks to assistance from the Dublin Archdiocese, as well as the Department
of Arts, Sports and Tourism, we are digitising the correspondence series of
Rectors Cullen and Kirby. The Cullen collection (5 series excepting the New
Collection) is now available for viewing by registered scholars; the Kirby
collection (excepting the New Collection) is featured until 1873. The
original documents will still be available to researchers, but having
digital copies will reduce the handling of the papers, and will enable many
to use the resource without travelling to Rome.
This work is carried out for us by a
subsidiary of the Italian State Archives at the
Centro
di Fotoriproduzione Legatoria e Restauro.
Storage:
State funding also helps us to re-house documents in archivally secure
boxes, and to generally improve storage conditions of our records, be they
letters, reports, photographs, or vellum manuscripts.
Assessment and storage of medieval
fragments: until a list
of the thirty fragments is in preparation; in the meantime they have been
consigned to safe storage.
Assessment and cataloguing of photographs:
see our online exhibition for samples
of these. Many do not have any captions, and should you have any reliable
information about people appearing in these, we would be happy to hear from
you.
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