GRACEFUL17: A Scalable Digital Fast-Track Strategy: Mining, Modelling, and Mastering Early Modern Church Administration Data

This presentation introduces a DH workflow and technology stack tailored to efficiently collect, structure, store, search, and analyze early modern serial sources related to church administration. The Vatican Archives contain vast amounts of material, spanning meters of documents, which record in concise Latin entries who was permitted to hold specific offices across the entire global jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in the premodern era. These sources represent the manifestation of a centrally organized job market, offering invaluable insights for church, administrative, and social history. Until today, these sources have remained largely unexplored—not least because their sheer volume has rendered systematic study seemingly impossible. The multinational project GRACEFUL17 is attempting to unfold this pre-modern mode of governance for the first time in its entirety.