The Historical Archive of the Pontifical Gregorian University is inaugurating a series of events aimed at making its documentary heritage known to a wider circle of scholars. "The formula will be to 'bring out' some of the 6,000 codices preserved here," explains the director of the Archives, Fr. Martín M. Morales S.J., "to trigger virtuous processes: a conference with an eminent scholar, the launching of new lines of research, the restoration of the manuscript itself". In this way, the Historical Archive intends to promote all the processes that unravel from the objective materiality of the manuscripts it preserves and passes on.
The day on 12 November will take as its starting point the manuscript translation - one of the first in Italian - of some of Blaise Pascal's Provincial Letters. Special guest of the morning, open to the public, will be historian and essayist Carlo Ginzburg. He will be entrusted with the opening of the first Workshop on "Pascal and the Jesuits: between norm and chance", followed by a discussion between Prof. Girolamo Imbruglia (University of Naples "L'Orientale") and the director Martín Morales. In the afternoon, a closed seminar will be held to present the manuscript and other materials preserved in the Archives. Participation is free of charge, subject to online registration.
The Historical Archive Workshops will not only deal with ancient codices, but also with more modern documentary collections. Among them is the Leiber Fund, which contains over three thousand letters and 10 folders of documents of the Jesuit Robert Leiber, personal secretary to Eugenio Pacelli - the future Pope Pius XII - while he was nuncio in Munich and Berlin. No less surprising is the Wetter Fund, named after the Austrian Jesuit Gustave Wetter, a scholar of Marxist philosophy who rose to international fame, founder of a Centre for Marxist Studies and founder of a thematic collection of 42,000 volumes.
Further back in time, the Historical Archive of the Pontifical Gregorian University is a precious heritage which attests the intellectual activity of the Roman College's Jesuits, from its foundation in 1551 until the suppression of the Society of Jesus, occurred in 1773. More than 5,000 manuscripts prove the lessons of rhetoric, grammar, philosophy and theology, delivered over the course of two centuries, as well as the study on Greek and Latin classics, astronomy, mathematics, physics and languages such as Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. Along with this material, other important documents give evidence of the feverish research and study that took place in the Roman College; to mention the most well-known examples: the impressive correspondence of the eclectic Athanasius Kircher and the letters of the mathematician Christopher Clavius, the more than 150 codes used by Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino to write the Istoria del Concilio di Trento, the Fund relating to Angelo Secchi, which is considered the father of modern astrophysics.