Father Delattre"s Correspondence and the History of Christian Archaeology in the Maghreb: His Correspondence with Giovanni Battista de Rossi in 1885=La correspondance du père Delattre et l'histoirede l'archéologie chrétienne au Maghreb: La correspondance avecGiovanni Battista de Rossi en 1885 Articles uri icon

authors

  • CECALUPO, CHIARA

publication date

  • June 2022

start page

  • 355

end page

  • 373

issue

  • 2

volume

  • LVII

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0018-1005

abstract

  • The contribution presents five unpublished letters from Father Alfred Louis
    Delattre"s correspondence kept at the Central Archives of the Missionaries of Africa/White
    Fathers in Rome. This essay is part of a wider study, carried out over a longer period, on the
    development of Christian archaeology in the Mediterranean, always leading with special
    attention to archive documents. The letters of Fr. Delattre preserved in the aforementioned
    Archive are numerous, well known but not all have been well studied by scholars in recent
    years. For this text, I will focus on a group of these letters, related to the contacts made by
    Fr. Delattre with Giovanni Battista de Rossi, the main Christian archaeologist from Rome in
    the late XIXth century. These texts are useful to understand the formation of Delattre"s ideas
    and the influences Roman excavations had on him during his work for the promotion of the
    discipline of Christian archaeology in the Maghreb and the musealization of early Christian
    finds in his museum in Tunis. In fact, the aim is not solely to present many original texts
    by Delattre, contributing to the knowledge of his epistolary, which is a mine of information
    for archaeological studies in North Africa. Additionally, it will examine his research and
    discoveries of Christian archaeology in a wider frame, and offer a solid documentary basis
    for those who will deal in the future with Christian antiquities in the Maghreb.

keywords

  • delattre; de rossi; christian archaeology; tunis; letters