https://publicmedievalist.com/vatican-secret-archives/

Dan Brown lied to you. I’m sorry.
I know it’s hard to accept. Who could have guessed that religious-themed thrillers might not reflect the cutthroat world of academia? I am a scholar of the papacy in the late Middle Ages. And since Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons is still very much the reference point people have for my work, you might assume that I spend most of my time escaping hermetically sealed reading rooms and avoiding assassination. Sadly (fortunately?!), not so much.
But I’ve been to the Vatican Secret Archives.
I lived to tell the tale.
And I can tell you what it’s really like.
What makes the Vatican Secret Archives a “secret”?
The word ‘secret’ in the Vatican Secret Archives may be the reason for some of the rampant speculation about what goes on in there. But it makes the archive sound much sexier than it is.
The ‘secret’ part of the name comes from the Latin name, the Archivium Secretum Vaticanum. The word secretum has branched in English meaning. On one hand, it can mean “secret” or “hidden.” On the other, it can mean “personal” or “private” (in the sense of private property). This is what the name of the archive actually means—the personal archives of the pope. It is for this very reason that last year, Pope Francis changed its name to the Vatican Apostolic Archive to try and distance it from its reputation.
This already makes them a lot less exciting, I know, even if there are about 50 miles of shelf space in them. They are a treasure trove me as a medievalist, though, if not so much for conspiracy theorists.
The Vatican’s Medieval Treasure Trove
The Vatican archives have a lot of medieval material. There’s some material dating back to the 8th century, but it is very fragmented and rare. The medieval holdings mainly consist of books of letters and bureaucratic records, which start in the roughly 1205—though such items are quite limited for this century. By the start of the 14th century, though, we have loads of letters sent by the popes, petition…