Category: Archive Theories

• The "Global" Library Fire

  This theory claimed that the Vatican was systematically destroying ancient books, archives, and libraries around the world in order to erase the true record of human history before the arrival of 1900. It belongs to a broader anti-Vatican and anti-clerical tradition that portrayed Rome as both the keeper and destroyer of dangerous knowledge. By the late nineteenth century, the secrecy surrounding the Vatican archives and library made it possible to imagine that the institution was not preserving history but eliminating it.