The Vatican Library Launches New Scholarly Journal
By Church News
The Vatican Library, one of the world’s oldest libraries, has launched a new scholarly journal to help promote high-quality research, dialogue across cultures and sharing of knowledge related to the library’s holdings.
The Vatican Library Review “aspires to be an attractive place to publish high-quality, peer-reviewed research by actively hosting and allocating contributions,” Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonca, Vatican librarian and archivist wrote in an editorial on the journal’s first issue. The editorial was republished by the Vatican newspaper on Sept. 7.
The cardinal invited scholars to submit their contributions, adding that the readers would explore each article regardless of their field of interest and “join us in this two-fold endeavour of scientific rigour and cross-cultural dialogue.”
Some of the articles in the first issue included, “An Unpublished Illuminated Codex from Catalonia in the Vatican Library” and “Visual Kabbalah in the Italian Renaissance. The Booklet of Kabbalistic Forms.”
Created by Pope Nicholas V in the 15th century, the Vatican Library belongs to the pope. However, Pope Leo XIII decided it should be more widely accessible to the academic world.
The Vatican Library houses some 80,000 manuscripts, nearly 1.6 million books, approximately 8,400 incunabula (books and pamphlets printed before 1501) and coin and medal collections.
Its mission, Cardinal Mendonca wrote in his editorial, is to “conserve its continually growing number of treasures and to share this heritage with the academic world.” The library “has always been a place of research and an active host for collaboration.”
Over the years, the library has: seen a massive renovation of its facilities to make it more secure and up to modern-day standards; tagged items with Radio Frequency Identification chips to better track and identify them; continued to digitise its holdings, offering reproductions online.
The journal seeks peer-reviewed “innovative scholarly contributions” to showcase each scholar’s knowledge, insights and discoveries, the cardinal wrote, including the world of “early career scholars” and those whose work “may not fit neatly” in more established journals.
The journal will accept works written in English, German, French and Italian and can include shorter notes, reports on conferences, book reviews and summaries of finished dissertations.