The fact that older manuscript collections will have multiple texts in a single codex or scroll with little annotation to the existence of these further texts makes even generating a list of what’s in the collection a challenge. This gives me some hope that a complete catalog of the Vatican Secret¹ Archives might exist in my lifetime.

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1. “Secret,” here, does not mean what you might assume, but rather refers to the fact that the archive belongs to the Pope personally and not some department of the curia.