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Ut per litteras apostolicas Papal Letters - Lettres Pontificales Brepols Publishers Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes (CNRS, Paris) École française de Rome Ut per litteras apostolicas The online database Ut per litteras apostolicas represents an electronic version of the renowned Registres et lettres des Papes du XIIIe siècle (32 vols.; Rome, 1883- ) Registres et lettres des Papes du XIVe siècle (48 vols.; Rome, 1899- ) With respect to the litterae communes, the electronic corpus will incorporate all the data contained in the printed volumes. Subsequent updates will supplement this information, as well as supplying the complete text of the papal letters themselves, and further adding the litterae secretae to this corpus. The online database provides striking information on the most varied aspects of medieval society: church institutions, the clergy, the papal states, politics, the legal system, taxation, government and finance, secular society, the religious life, intellectual and artistic life, the economy, wars, law and order, the environment and natural disasters, and daily life. Today the database contains approx. 12 million words and is devoted to the papacies of John XXII, Benedict XII and Urban V. The Database This online database provides both more extensive and more intensive searching than has hitherto been possible from the conventional printed publications. In particular, the user can undertake a search either on the entire database of the three pontificates or one particular papacy or even a particular year of a papacy, and can refine the search according to various criteria - date, type of letter, place of issue, and so forth ­ within designated fields which draw their information from independent documentary sources. It should be possible, for instance, to identify a bull according to its date of publication (both in the Latin original and its modern equivalent) or its reference number in the printed edition, to undertake a word- or name-search taking into account a large number of possible spelling variants (since the software automatically checks alternative spellings based on common variants found in medieval Latin), or to undertake a search by subject-matter (such as on religious life, or another of the subjects mentioned above). A Wonderful Research Tool Ut per litteras apostolicas provides online the complete collection of papal letters from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But it is the possibility of searching such a resource with powerful software, which makes this database so useful. As a result, a documentary source which has been underexploited, or even unexploited, can now be studied. The international community of medievalists will, for the first time, be now able to draw properly on this rich body of material. For information about subscription types or about a free trial, go to the Papal Letters­ online page on the Brepols Publishers website. © 2002, Brepols Publishers NV - All rights reserved.