Tens of thousands of handwritten documents occupy about 52 miles of shelves

Accessing the tens of thousands of stale tomes and manuscripts in the Secret Archives of the Vatican has always proved difficult. This was despite the fact that these Archives have been open to scholars since 1881.

Thanks to advancement in communication technology, the Holy See is now to use artificial intelligence to unlock the mysteries tucked away in these archives.




Several historical insights remain hidden due to the fact that only a negligible proportion of the documents in the archives has been scanned and made available online just as even fewer have been made searchable. The In Codice Ratio project will now correct this.

The software to be used will connect several features of the old manuscripts to assemble whole letters and words. To train the software, teenagers from 24 Italian schools were asked to complete a computer exercise in which they identified individual letters from a 13th-century manuscript by comparing them to reference specimens.

Of particular interest to Britain would be a letter from parliament urging the Pope to annul Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.