Athanasius Kircher Correspondence (AKC)


The publication of Kircher's Correspondence is the primary goal of the project. Our first aim is transcribing all the letters within the 14 codices preserved in the Historical Archives of the Pontifical Gregorian University; letters kept in other institutions will be added too. Each letter will be transcribed, commented and annotated with the help of GATE contributors. Annotation allows to univocally identify entities cited within the texts, such as names, places, works and so on; entities will have a dedicated page where users can acquire information about them.

The Athanasius Kircher Correspondence is a huge corpus of letters written and received by Athanasius Kircher during his whole life. From this page you can browse the correspondence through indexes and other research tools.

If you want to collaborate to the Athanasius Kircher Correspondence transcription project, you should ask for an account by using this form. We will create a username associated to your email address; then you will receive an email with a temporary random password that will allow you to log in GATE.

To start your collaboration to this project, browse the ToDo section of this page. Before editing any page, please carefully read the Athanasius Kircher Correspondence transcription guidelines.

Full-text search

To search within the Kircher correspondence, use the following search module.

Metadata search

Today, the database contains metadata of 135 of 2,623 letters and it is constantly growing, thanks to the help of GATE users.

5.1% completed



You can browse Years, Names and Places indexes of the Athanasius Kircher correspondence. Currently, these indexes include letters metadata only, so they don't list, e.g., cited names or cited works. If you want to perform a full-text search, you should use the search bar within this page.
By clicking on , you can expand the main index and sub-indexes of your interest; if you find a grey , it means no letters have been still uploaded in that sub-index; by clicking on the index name, you will instead redirect to that index special page, where you can find detailed information about how the entries have been structured.

To do

Before editing any page, please carefully read the transcription guidelines for this project. In the following list you can find pages or letters to proofread or to transcribe.

AKC Not proofread(249 P)