Regesta - Surviving Regesta

Surviving Regesta

From the centuries previous to the pontificate of Innocent III (1199–1216) there remain only fragments 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 12th century have disappeared.

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 according to indictions; that each of these volumes was divided into twelve parts, before each of which the name of the corresponding month was written. In this way information is attained as to plan of the earliest volumes of the papal Regesta. A manuscript of the Vatican archives contains letters of John VIII (872-882). which begins with September, 876, and extend to the end of the pontificate. This is not an original register, but a copy of the 11th century. Separate letters, fifty-five in number, belonging to the first four years of the pontificate of this pope, exist in a collection contained in a manuscript of the 12th century in the British Museum, London (manuscripts Add. 8874). The manuscript contains letters of Gelasius I (492-96), Pelagius I (556-561), Leo IV (847-55), John VIII (872-82), Stephen V (885-91), Alexander II (1061–73), and Urban II (1088–99). The study of the manuscript by Ewald led to important conclusions concerning the volumes of the Regesta. Another manuscript at Cambridge contains some seventy letters from the Regesta of Adrian IV (1154–59), Alexander III (1159–81), and Lucius III (1181–85) . 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 is also only an extract of the original Regesta. In it the letters are no longer arranged according to indictions, but according to the year of the pontificate. A fraction of the Regesta of the antipope Anacletus II (1130–38), containing 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 fragments 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 Deusdedit, gathered the greater part of their material.