Vatican publish Knights Templar documents
The Vatican has published a slew of centuries-old documents about the Knights Templar, a Christian military order that operated in the Middle Ages and remains a source of endless fascination for conspiracy theorists, Holy Grail seekers, occultists, and Dan Brown readers. The documents are collected in a 300 page book published by Scrinium. The cover price is $8,377 and only 300 were printed. Tomorrow is the 700th anniversary of the day that King Philip IV ordered the Order's members in France to be rounded up, charged with heresy, tortured, and burned at the stake. Philip later insisted that Pope Clement V arrest all remaining members of the Order, take their money, kill many of them, and disband the group. From the Associated Press:
The publishing house said the new book includes the "Parchment of Chinon," a 1308 decision by (Pope) Clement (V) to save the Templars and their order. The document was misplaced for centuries in the archives and found again by researchers in 2001.Link to AP article, Link to the Knights Templar entry on Wikipedia
According to the Vatican archives Web site, the parchment shows that Clement absolved the Templar leaders of the heresy charge, though he did recognize they were guilty of immorality, and he planned to reform the order.
However, pressured by Philip, Clement later reversed his decision and suppressed the order in 1312.
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With a price like that and a limited run, you'd think they want the conspiracy theorists around..
How the hell do you come up with a cover price of $8,377?!?! That is as strange and arbitrary as charging someone $9,250 per track for a copyright infraction...
I'm guessing it's a more even price in Euros, Edgore.
E6000 works out to be about $8,400 at 1.40:1, so if its 5999.99 or something...
It would be cooler if the quoted the price in Soldis.
It's easy to get the impression that God's a little short on cash these days. The Vatican has actually been commercializing various bits and pieces of its heritage for some time now.
i assume they'll make the texts freely availible online, as its part of catholics history so why would the Vatican try to capitalize on knowlege that should be freely given to its believers.
Woot, only around 690 years before the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence will gain a similar reprieve!
"The Vatican has actually been commercializing various bits and pieces of its heritage for some time now."
Well, yes. Since the fourth century or so.
Sucks to have a pope absolve you then "reverse the decision." Is God okay with a reversed decision? I didn't think so, but I'm not a pope. So I'm probably wrong.
Why the high price? I mean, they could've made a larger run at a much lower price and they'd have sold them all. But $8,000 books? Who besides the Vatican can even AFFORD that.
I think I'll just wait for the movie to come out.
Let's hope Kevin Smith directs.
I assume the price reflects high production costs. They're reproducing hundreds of extremely miscellaneous old documents. Lots of expert translation and transcription there. If they're duplicating images, the process costs even more. Also, the small print run gets you high per-unit costs.
I expect they're also hoping to keep this stuff in the hands of scholars who have the background to understand the material in context. "Satisfying the curiosity of conspiracy theorists" isn't part of the papacy's core mission statement.
"Ssatisfying the curiosity of conspiracy theorists" isn't part of the papacy's core mission statement."
this is true, but satisfying the curiosity of the tenants of their own faith should be. If this is just the initial cost, and a few years later said scholars release the texts (with their commentary of course) it could only mean more money for the church.
but if they only keep part of their faiths history accessible to the people willing to pay out a very high premium, then its quite similar to what Scientology does with OTIII
Cpt. Tim: "but if they only keep part of their faiths history accessible to the people willing to pay out a very high premium, then its quite similar to what Scientology does with OTIII"
Or the Catholic Church (again) with pedophile priests?
i don't understand your question. you mean the catholic church has them? Indeed. An estimated one in ten of them.
$8,000+, huh? I'll wait for the paperback, thank you very much.
Yes, from what I've read about this, the production values are such that they're even reproducing old stains and whatnot. They're essentially trying to make the documents as close facsimiles of the originals as they can.
This whole story has been very interesting. Even before Benedict became Benedict, he was investigating Templars. As for the conspiracy angles, there are a lot...anonymous "Templars" were making "apologize of we're telling on you" threats, and Ratzi was reportedly taking them seriously. IOW, there were a lot of strange thing going on behind the scenes.
One of the many things that the Church has hidden, and now sells for a price.
This is what I'd like to do. Get together a LARGE group of people. Membership would be $20 a month or something, and then fees would go toward the purchase of rare books.
Then these rare books would be scanned at high resolution.
THEN, and here's the beautiful part, print ready PDFs could be made, and torrented. Voila! Distributed Library of Rare Items. DLRI. or some such acronym.
If somebody out there knows of an organization like this, please email me. Otherwise, I guess I'll be starting it.