Acta Latomorum: A Chronology of the History of French and Foreign Freemasonry - Hardcover

Acta Latomorum, or Chronology of the History of Freemasonry by Claude-Antoine Thory is one of the foundational works of Masonic scholarship - a comprehensive record of the institution's development from its traditional origins through 1814, compiled by a senior member of the Grand Orient of France and published in Paris in 1815. This volume presents the first complete English translation of both of Thory's original volumes combined into a single work.

The first part of the work is the Chronological Table itself: a year-by-year narrative of Masonic history spanning traditional and legendary origins, the founding of the Premier Grand Lodge of England in 1717, the explosive proliferation of higher degrees and competing rites across Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, the upheavals of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, and the wave of anti-Masonic edicts issued by European sovereigns in 1814. Written from within the institution by a man who had access to its archives and correspondence, the Chronological Table remains an indispensable primary source.

The second part of the first volume is Thory's Alphabetical Nomenclature of the Principal Rites, Grades, Sects, and Secret Societies - an encyclopedic reference covering hundreds of Masonic and para-Masonic bodies, degrees, and systems, from the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite and the Strict Observance to the Rite of Misraïm, the Illuminati of Bavaria, and the Élus Coëns.

The Supplement constitutes a Masonic chartulary of primary documents gathered from rare books and manuscripts: the Ashmole record of 1646, the St. Clair charters of Scotland, the Schaw regulations, Laurence Dermott's letter on the Ancient and Modern schism, the Statutes of the Swedish Order of Charles XIII, the remarkable Prussian cabinet correspondence on Freemasonry from Frederick the Great through Frederick William II, anti-Masonic edicts from Pope Pius VII, the Regency of Milan, the King of Sardinia, and the King of Bavaria, the complete Statuta Commilitonum Ordinis Templi of the Order of the Temple, the treaties between the Grand Orient of France and the Scottish Directorates of the Rectified Rite, and Beyerlé's translation of Nicolaï's celebrated fragment on the origins of Freemasonry.

Fully annotated with translator's notes, this edition is designed for Masonic scholars and historians, practicing Freemasons with an interest in the institution's history, and all students of Western esoteric traditions and secret societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.