Two Classics majors and another Notre Dame intern worked for six weeks this summer as manuscript transcription interns at Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Using the GATE digital system, we transcribed the c. 1650 108-page Latin manuscript Dialogus Asceticus Cosmiele et Theodidacto Interlocutoribus by Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit theologian and polymath. It was startling to discover how much the manuscript preserved a record of the author's thought process. There are places where Kircher, wrestling with a technical theological concept, writes one word, then crosses it out and inserts another above it, then crosses that one out and reverts to the original. There are places where German, Kircher's native language, seems to peek through his Latin: sometimes he writes a verb in position two, then catches himself, crosses it out, and rewrites it at the end of the clause. There are some places where Kircher writes fluidly, and others where his words are so cramped it is difficult not to imagine him hunched over the page in concentration. We tried to preserve these textual foibles in our transcription whenever possible, using basic coding to indicate crossed out words, insertions, and marginal text. After finishing the transcription, we went on to read the manuscript and compose for each section English abstracts to help future researchers navigate the document.
