Guide to Documents Relating to French and British North America in ...

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a rather difficult task to acknowledge the help received from all the friends, colleagues,
scholars and institutions who supported me throughout the production of the Calendar. For their
continuous support during these several years, I wish to thank first of all my friends and teachers
William J. Eccles (University of Toronto), Raimondo Luraghi (Universita di Genova), Tiziano Bonazzi
(Universita di Bologna), Piero Del Negro (Universita di Padova), Cornelius J. Jaenen (University of
Ottawa), Pierre Savard (Universite d'Ottawa) and Giorgio Spini (Universita di Firenze).
It was thanks to the joint effort of the National Archives of Canada and Saint Paul University
(Ottawa) that this project was initiated. Having these friends and colleagues in Ottawa lent a sense of
teamwork to the project. In particular I wish to thank Robert S. Gordon and Victorin Chabot of the
National Archives of Canada, and Pierre Hurtubise of Saint Paul University. Ovila Gadouas translated
the preliminary version into French, as it appeared in microfiche in October 1983. He was much more
than a simple translator. We discussed and examined each entry together, and he was able to make
several improvements. His untimely death on 17 July 1984 prevented him from seeing this project
through to its completion.
Josef Metzler was recently appointed Archivist of the Vatican Secret Archives. While I was
preparing the Calendar, however, he was the archivist of Propaganda. His knowledge of the archives
and of the history of the Congregation proved invaluable. I also wish to thank Sister Maria Margherita
Villaluz, who was an employee at the archives of Propaganda during my period of research there.
While I was preparing the Calendar, Anton Debevec was pursuing a similar task for the Academy of
American Franciscan History, and had been working at the archives of Propaganda since 1955. Many
times I asked for his assistance, and his experience always helped me greatly.
In recent years, I was greatly supported by a working team that gathered in the Roman offices
of the Canadian Academic Centre in Italy (CACI). Pierre Hurtubise and I, together with the two
subsequent Directors of CACI, Amilcare Iannucci (University of Toronto) and Roberto Perin (York
University), launched a new project whose aim was to calendar documents of North American interest
in the other Roman archives and libraries. Monique BenoIt and Gabriele P. Scardellato came to Rome
from Canada in September 1982, and until July 1984 calendared various series preserved in the Vatican
Secret Archives. The project was financially assisted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada. We spent many hours discussing the difficulties and problems we were
encountering.
A number of Italian colleagues, archivists and historians were very helpful on various occasions.
I would like to mention in particular Isidoro Agudo (Archivio Generale dei Frati Minori Cappuccini),
Franco Angiolini (Universita di Pisa), Stefano Arnaldo Baiocchi (Biblioteca Statale del Monumento
Nazionale di Farfa), Georges Bottereau (fonnerly with the Archivum Romanum Societatis lesu), Hugh
Fenning (Collegio San Oemente), Antonio Frotes (Archivio Generale dei Cannelitani Scalzi),
Alessandro Galuzzi (Pontificia Universita Lateranense), Bernard Jacqueline (Sacra Congregazione per
l'Evangelizzazione dei Popoli), Elio Lodolini (Archivio di Stato di Roma), Francesca Loverci
(Universita di Roma), Lajos Pasztor (Archivio Segreto Vaticano), Salvatore Rotta (Universita di
Genova), Alessandra Surdi (Centro Italiano di Studi Americani), Leo van Wijmen (Collegio
Internazionale S. Alberto), Anita Weston Bilardello (fonnerly with the Universita di Roma), and Felix
Zubillaga (Istituto Storico della Compagnia di Gesu).
Over the years, in connection with the Calendar, I met and corresponded with a number of
foreign scholars, and visited many libraries and archives outside Italy. I wish to acknowledge the help
I received in Canada from Selma Barkham (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Cyril Byrne (Saint
Mary's University), Jean Fournier (Archives de l'Ordre Hospitalier de Saint Jean-de-Dieu), Annand
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