Jesuit Chronicles (Corpus Jesuiticum)

Images and metadata (bibliographical and codicological) for the Corpus Jesuiticum which contains information on the Jesuit Order in Central Europe in 485 manuscripts consisting of a total of 138505 images.

The digitization of the Corpus Jesuiticum took place between 2023 and 2024. It was carried out by ONB’s Department of Digitization, and was funded by the EU within the framework of the program “Next Generation.” Master files are in TIFF format, access copies are supplied in JPEG. The descriptive metadata was created manually by a manuscript scholar in preparation for the digitization. They include among others the title, year/place of publication and a description of the physical object (for a full list see the Readme-file on webpage). The source language is Latin, the cataloguing language is German.

The dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773 lead to the dispersion of the Jesuit archives and libraries. In the aftermath, the Viennese Court Library acquired 485 volumes considered historically significant into its collection. Most important are annual reports by Jesuit houses and provinces (“Litterae annuae”), which are supplemented by works dealing with the history of individual houses (“Diaria”), normative texts, and various other administrative documents. The manuscripts originate from the former Jesuit provinces of Austria and Bohemia, as well as, to a lesser extent, from Polonia Minor. They thus cover a broad geographical region from Central Europe to Ukraine.