Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 12.djvu/798

 REGESTA

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REGESTA

Rufinus ("Apolog. adv. Rufinuni", III, xx) St. Jerome refers to the archive (chartarium) of the Roman Church, where the letter of Pope Anastasius I (399- 401) on the controversy over the doctrines of Origen was preser\'ed. There are also notices concerning the registration of papal letters in the documents of sev- eral popes of the fifth century. Thus Pope Zosimus ill his letter of 22 Sept., 417, to the bishops of Africa refers to the fact that all the earlier negotiations with Coelestius had been examined at Rome (Coustant, ■'Epist. Rom. Pontif.", 955). Consequently copies of the documents in question must have existed. From this time onwards it remained the fixed custom of the papal chancery to copy the official papers issued by it in registers.

From the centuries previous to the pontificate of Innocent III (1199-1216) there remain only frag- ments of the registry volumes of the papal chancery and these in large part merely in later copies. Nearly all the volumes of the papal Regesta up to the end of the twelfth centurj- have disappeared. The frequent local warfare in Rome and the conflagrations from which the city sufTered explain sufficiently the loss of the oldest records. The most important fragments of this period that have been preserved are the following: nearly 850 letters, in three groups, of the Regesta of Pope Gregory I (590-604). An investigation proved that the original Regesta consisted of fourteen papyrus volumes, corresponding to the number of years of the pontificate, which were arranged accord- ing to indictions; that each of these volumes was di- vitled into twelve parts, before each of which the name of the corresponding month was written. In this way information is attamed as to the plan of the earliest volumes of the papal Regesta. A manuscript of the Vatican archives contains letters of John \TII (872- 82), which begin with September, 87G, and extend to the end of the pontificate. This is not an original register, but a copy of the eleventh century. Separate letters, fifty-five in number, belonging to the first four years of the pontificate of this pope, exist in a collec- tion contained in a manuscript of the twelfth century in the British Museum, London (MSS. Add. 8874). The manuscript contains letters of Gelasius I (492- 96), Pelagius I (556-61), Leo IV (847-55), John VIII (872-82), Stephen V (885-91), Alexander II (1061-73), and L'rban II (1088-99). The study of the manuscript by Ewald [''Neues Archiv", V (1880), 275 sqq., 503 sqq.] led to important conclusions con- cerning the volumes of the Regesta. Another manu- script at Cambridge contains some seventy letters from the Regesta of Adrian IV (1154-59), Alexander III (1159-81), and Lucius III (1181-85) [see Lowen- feld in "Neues Archiv", X (1885), 586 sqq.]. Again, large parts of the Regesta of Gregory VII (1073-85), namely 381 letters, are contained in a manuscript in the Vatican Archives. This collection also is only an extract of the original Regesta. In it the letters are no longer arranged according to indictions, but accord- ing to the year of the pontificate. A fragment of the Regesta of the antipope Anacletus II (1130-38), con- taining thirty-eight letters of various contents, has been preserved in a manuscript of Monte Cassino (Ewald in "Neues Archiv", III, 164 sqq.). Besides these collections of letters which have preserved frag- ments of the earliest papal Regesta, rich material is also to be found in the canonical collections of the Middle Ages. In part these collections go back directly or indirectly to the volumes of the Regesta of the papal archives, from which the authors of these collections, as Anselm of Lucca, and above all Deus- dedit, gathered the greater part of their material. From Innocent III onwards the manuscript volumes of the papal Regesta still exist in the Vatican Archives.

Tlie Regesta of the thirteenth centurj' are beauti- fully WTittcn parchment volumes. Yet the most of these in their present form have been made from older

volumes. How these older volumes, the real original Regesta, were planned cannot be positively decided. From the fourteenth century onwards registry vol- umes of paper were used for the entering of the copies. However, when the popes returned from Avignon to Rome, these paper Regesta were left at Avignon and copies of them were made in parchment registry vol- umes that were brought to Rome. At a later era the original Regesta were also brought to the Vatican Archives, so that there are two series in existence for the Avignon epoch of the fourteenth century. From the end of the fourteenth centurj' onwards the vol- umes of the Regesta were generally made of paper. Numerous investigations have been made by various scholars as to the arrangement of the volumes of the Regesta, the rules or customs observed in the entering of the separate pieces, as to the question whether the draft or the finished letter was copied, and as to many other matters in diplomatics, without reaching very certain results. In the thirteenth century the letters were divided into "Litterse communes" and "Lit- tera> de curia" or "Curiales", the latter dealing mostly with affairs of general importance. At a later date other headings {littcrce secnla:, litterce de beneficiis) were also introduced. Besides the regular Regesta of the papal letters made in the papal chancer^', there were similar Regesta of the papal letters executed since the fourteenth century in the Apostolic Camera. From about the middle of the fourteenth century the regis- ters of petitions were also preserved, in which were entered not the papal documents, but the memorials to the pope, in reply to which the papal documents were issued.

As collections of the official documents of the papal chancery, the Regesta are a verj' important historical authority. For convenience in historical investiga- tion various scholars have published in chronological order all knowTi papal documents of large periods, with brief summaries of the contents of the letters. The three great collections of this kind are: JafTe, "Regesta Pontificum Romanorum ab condita ecclesia ad annum p. Chr. n. 1198"; 2nd ed. by S. Lowenfeld, F. Kaltenbrunner, P. Ewald (2 vols., Leipzig, 1SS8). P. F. Kehr has undertaken a new edition of the Re- gesta for this period in topographical and at the same time chronological order: "Regesta Pontif. Roman.: ItaUa Pontificia" (Berlin, 1906 — ); "GermaniaPoutif- icia" (Berlin, 1910); with the co-operation of other scholars he is still carrying on his great undertaking. Jaffe's work was supplemented by Potthast, "Re- gesta Pontificum Romanorum inde ab an. p. Chr. n. 1198 ad an. 1304" (2 vols., Beriin, 1874-75). Letters of several popes taken from the volumes of the Regesta have been published by: Lowenfeld, "Epis- tolse Pontificum Romanorum inedita>" (Leipzig, 1885), taken from the manuscript at Cambridge; Rodenberg, "Epistola; sa>c. XIII e Regestis Rom. Pont, selectse" (Berlin, 1883 — ), in "Slon. Germ. Hist." The Regesta of the letters of Gregory I were edited again by Ewald and Hartmann, "Gregorii I. Registrum epistolarum" in "Mon. Germ. Hist." (Beriin, 1891—). The letters of Gregory VII were edited by Jaff^, "Monumenta Gregoriana" in "Bibli- otheca rerum Germanicarum" (2 vols., Berlin, 1868). As early as 1591 the records of John VIII were pub- lished from the manuscript in the Vatican. Of the popes of the thirteenth centurs', Pressuti edited (Rome, lSSS-96) the Regesta of Honorius III (1216- 27) from the volumes of the Regesta in the Vatican Archives; the Regesta of the succeeding popes to Boniface \TII (d. 1303) were edited by the members of the Ecole Fran(jaise of Rome, the publication of the Regesta of all these popes being yet incomplete; after a group of Benedictines had issued the Regesta of Clement V (1305-14), the members of the Ecole Fran(aise began again with John XXII (1316-34), with the intention of publishing the Regesta of the