Description
This calendar provides full English summaries of all the British and Irish material in the Vatican Registers of Alexander VI (1942-1503). The bulk of the entries typically Scottish and Irish are letters expedited by the camera and the apostolic secretariate. However, the main interest of the volume in its coverage the pope’s Secreata or private office registers. This is, or rather was, a highly classified source and illustrates the course of Anglopapal relations at the highest level. Unfortunately, the Secreata have been mutilated. To make good loss the volume collects missing letters from twenty-five different archives and libraries. The introduction explores the clandestine world of the pope’s private secretaries one of them an agent of Henry VII and considers how the register comes to be mutilated. While primarily intended for historians, the volume also serves other disciplines. There is something for the incunabulist; and even new evidence for the dating of the oldest pieces of English Paper.
