The Dictionary of Catholic Theology (Dictionnaire de théologie catholique) is the largest reference work of Catholic theology ever completed. Alfred Vacant began it in 1899. Eugène Mangenot and then Émile Amann carried it through to 1950, when the last of its fifteen volumes was published in Paris.
Its 1,916 articles are signed by the scholars who wrote them. They cover the whole field: doctrines, controversies, councils, religious orders, and the theologians themselves, from the Fathers to the twentieth century. The long entries are monographs in their own right, and each one closes with its literature, which is often the quickest way into the older scholarship on a question.
The work was finished before the Second Vatican Council, so it records both the tradition and the way Catholic theology understood itself in the first half of the twentieth century. The articles are in French, with an English translation alongside them wherever one is ready.
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