Literae annuae
Despite constituting a specific genre of documents
that only existed in the Jesuit Order, the annual reports (literae annuae) rank among
the most frequently preserved early modern narrative sources originating from within
religious orders. These texts would be produced by all order houses. In a
structure that was more or less binding, they described the activities of the Jesuits
over the relevant previous year, with the aim of providing information to senior
representatives of the Order within the provincial centre as well as to brothers in the
provinces and in Rome, the centre of the Order. Three copies of the Report would be
prepared for these purposes and another, fourth copy, would be kept at the home college
to preserve its history. Although the suppression of the Jesuit Order brought about the
destruction or dispersion of most of its documents, literae annuae have been preserved
in a complete series and have for decades been used as the basic source for the history
of the individual houses of the order. For the Telč College, a group of reports kept at
the college level has also been preserved, in addition to the texts relating to the
College included in the convolutes pertaining to the entire province. These, to some
extent, compensate to us for the loss of the Historia collegii Telčensis.
The aim of the research conducted under the NAKI
project is to understand the production mechanisms of the individual texts, to analyse
their language form, to compare them with other similar texts (the preserved
elogia for the older and the Supplementa historiae for the later period) and, last but
not least, to attempt to determine the authors of the individual texts.
An digital edition was chosen as the format for making
selected parts of the Telč literae annuae available to the wider public.
There has been published two pilot documents by now:
The form of the edition is based on the methodology Metodika
evidence dokladů hmotné kultury v narativních pramenech se zaměřením na zpřístupnění
kulturně historických informací v cizojazyčných pramenech (Methodology of evidence
of references of material culture in narrative sources with a focus on access to
cultural and historical information in foreign language sources).
