Catalogue of people

The Jesuit Order kept very detailed records of its members. The annual catalogues (catoalgi breves) are broken down by houses and contain information on the roles of the individual Jesuits within their communities. The catalogues would be prepared in the summer, in order to allow for any member transfers, which each year affected more than a third of the priests, brothers and scholastics, to be completed before the start of the academic year (i.e. mid-October). Originally, they were only kept in manuscript form, but from 1710 on, they were published in print and were thus available not only at the provincial and central headquarters but also at each order house.

We draw on these catalogues to create a catalogue of people connected to the Telč College, the first part of which (covering the period 1710-1773) will be published in the first half of 2018. Like other order houses, Telč also had its separate catalogue, organised – somewhat unusually – around the main roles of the Jesuits in their community (such as rectors, preachers, teachers, Third Probation instructors). Apart from annual catalogues, there were also three-year catalogues. One series of these three-year catalogues included biographic details of the members of the religious institute, while another one included an encrypted evaluation of their competences and character qualities.

These and other sources are used to obtain data on the Jesuits and members of other religious orders, which is then systematically processed and included in the Biographical and bibliographical database of members of religious orders and institutes in the Bohemian Lands in the early modern period (http://reholnici.hiu.cas.cz/katalog/clpr54.htm). The database may be utilised for your own research or to investigate the Jesuits born in Telč or the fates of those buried in the crypt in the Church of the Name of Jesus.