Microfilmed African Materials from the Archive of the Sacred Congregation “De Propaganda Fide”

Abstract

More than sixty years ago, in his preface to Carl Russell Fish's excellentGuide to the Materials for American History in Roman and Other Archives, the General Editor, J. Franklin Jameson, wrote as follows.In any series of guides to the materials for American history in foreign archives, the Roman archives deserve a prominent position and early treatment. Two reasons justify this statement. In the first place, although the documents in those archives relate primarily to ecclesiastical affairs, yet religious history constantly deserves the attention of the student of civil as well as of ecclesiastical history, and the influence of the Catholic Church and the scope of its operations can never be appropriately defined within confessional limits. In the second place, of all the great national archives of Europe there are none that have been so little exploited for purposes of American history as those of Rome and Italy.Although these words were written decades ago, it still remains true that too little use is made of such archival materials, and not only by American historians. One of the microfilm additions to the collections at Saint Louis University includes precisely this type of material in a collection that runs to about 250,000 manuscript pages from the Archive of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide (for the propagation of the faith). The congregation was definitively established by Gregory XV (1621-1623) in his constitutionInscrutabiliof June 22, 1622, although there had been some discussion about the formation of such a congregation for almost fifty years. This brief note description will be oriented toward the African materials only, but a general description of the indexes is necessary that the Africanist may be able to use them.