Sources and transcription
The letters to Kircher are available online and I have used
my own transcription
. The extracts from Johannes Schmidl, Historiae Societatis Jesu Provinciae Bohemiae, and Johannes Marcus Marci, Philosophia Vetus Restituta, were transcribed by Rene Zandbergen and Jorge Stolfi and can be found
here
and
here
: I have not seen the originals. I have emended a couple of
obvious typing errors (e.g. promum for primum) in the extracts from Schmidl. I have also had a few second thoughts about my own transcriptions of the letters to Kircher and incorporated them here.
Rene's site contains a translation of some of this material, contributed by me and others, in a sentence for sentence style. This time I wanted to capture something of the tone of the documents in English, and to do that it is necessary to break the structure of the Latin sentences and replace it with something that sounds natural in modern English. The task is not just to translate one language into another but to translate the thinking of one century into that of another and I have not always succeeded. Sometimes I have had to guess the meaning of an obscure word. More generally, the originals are the product of an age far more religious and hierarchical than our own, and one in which elaborate courtesy and classical rhetoric were part of normal usage. I have aimed for the most formal level which I think would be acceptable today.