News

The Abbot and the Archives Committee have announced a new scholar for 2020, so we would all like to take this opportunity to give a heartfelt thanks to our outgoing scholars Eugenia Schettino, Judy McGuinness and Andrew Walton.

Eugenia and Judy, both Spanish language experts, have translated the letters of Bishop Salvado’s brother, Santos, during the time before he came to New Norcia, and during his period here. It is an enormous corpus of correspondence, amounting to more than 400 letters, all of which have shed an amazing light on life in Spain and at New Norcia and especially on the relationship between Bishop Salvado and his brother. However, the body of correspondence for the pre-New Norcia years is so copious that not everything was able to be finished during the Scholarship. For this reason, we are all extremely grateful to Judy and Eugenia who have agreed to complete the task so that the letters can be published as part of the Archives’ series of books, probably in two volumes, at a later date.

Andrew has compiled an extraordinary database of several hundred early maps of New Norcia with linking references to correspondence and diaries. The maps have been photographed as part of the process and these too have been linked in to the database. Like the letters mentioned above, this was, and still is, an enormous undertaking and, again, we are very grateful to Andrew who has offered to continue cataloguing the maps on a voluntary basis.

A thousand thanks to all three of you for the wonderful work you have so far done for New Norcia.

Peter Hocking
Archivist