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The Dominican Order has had its historians from the outset, but it was only at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the writing of its history was first undertaken as an official project of the Order. The general chapter of 1600 issued the first of many ordinations requiring each province and vicariate to collect historical material and send it to the Master of the Order, with the intention that someone should be commissioned to write a general history of the Order: three people were actually given the task. Tomás Malvenda. Abraham Bzovius. and Jean de Réchac. but nothing satisfactory resulted from their labours: Malvenda was unhappy with what he had written when he abandoned the task in 1608 to return to his province, and his Annales were published against his will in 1627. Bzovius died in 1637 before he could do anything with his accumulated material, and, apart from some hagiographical compilations, the only fruit of Réchac^!s labours as 'historian general of the Order' was the publication in 1647 of a fanciful life of St Dominic combined with valuable historical notes on most of the French convents.

Greater success was achieved with two more limited projects. In 1670 provincials were told specifically to compile information on Dominican authors and send it to the Master for the use of the secular scholar Michele Giustiniani (1612-1680) who planned a Dominican bibliography: not long afterwards the Paris Dominican, Jacques Quétif, who was working on a similar undertaking, was formally commissioned by the Master to complete it. When he died in 1698, his compatriot Jacques Échard was appointed to succeed him, and in 1719-1721 he published the two-volume Scriptores Ordinis Prædicatorum which remains an essential reference-book to this day.

The material called for since 1600 included papal bulls and privileges: in 1705 Master General Cloche appointed his Spanish socius Tomás Ripoll to edit a Dominican bullarium: when Ripoll was elected Master in 1725 he entrusted the task to his French socius, Antonin Brémond, and the Bullarium Ordinis Prædicatorum was published in eight volumes between 1729 and 1740.

Brémond also turned his hand to the long-desiderated history of the Order. When he was elected to succeed Ripoll in 1748 the general chapter charged him to establish a group of historians to continue this work: in the next few years an equipe was duly assembled in Rome under the leadership of Tommaso Mamachi, and in 1756, a year after Brémond's death, the first volume of their scholarly Annales Ordinis Prædicatorum was published. However, despite the continuing work of Mamachi and his collaborators as individuals, no attempt was made to keep them together as a team or to recruit new historians to the task: and the turbulent times which followed the French Revolution were not propitious for its resumption.

Official concern for the Order's history is once again in evidence in 1841 when the general chapter called for an updated collection of material affecting the Dominican constitutions, and from the late 1850s onwards, under the auspices of successive Masters, a number of Dominicans in Rome concerned themselves with different aspects of Dominican history, such as Gaetano Lo-Cicero (1305-1888) who produced an updated edition of the Constitutiones. Declarationes et Ordinationes, Thomas Bonnet (1825-1895) who embarked on a revision of the Scriptores, Vincent Ligiez (1823-1898) who initiated the Epitome Bullarii (critical notes and additions to the Bullarium). 1893 saw the birth of a new periodical under the editorship of Pie Mothon (1854-1929), Analecta Sacri Ordinis Prædicatorum. containing regular sections devoted to historical material: in 1898 a series of editions of texts, Monumenta Ordinis Prædicatorum Historica. was initiated, fourteen volumes of which appeared between then and 1904, almost all of them edited by Benedikt Reichert (1868-1917). No complete revision of the Scriptores was achieved, but in 1909-1934 a continuation up to 1750 was published by Rémi Coulon and Antonin Papillon.

In 1929 the general chapter charged the newly elected Master, Stanislas Gillet, to establish a 'school of history' at the Collegio Angelico and to get voting Dominicans trained in history with a view to them producing critical editions of early Dominican texts. Instead of this, in 1931 Gillet established at Santa Sabina (which had recently been re-acquired for the Order) an Institute with its own specialist library, whose brief was to produce scholarly studies of Dominican history and editions of Dominican texts. The historical element in the Analecta was transferred to the Institute's new journal, Archivum Fratrum Prædicatorum, which first appeared in 1931, as did the first volume of a new series of monographs. Dissertationes Historicæ: the Monumenta were revived in 1933, and a complete revision of the Scriptores up to 1500 finally appeared in four volumes in 1960-1993. In 1992 the first issue of the Dominican History Newsletter was published, containing bibliographical and other information relevant to the study of Dominican history.

In 1974 the general chapter expressed a desire that Santa Sabina (since 1936 the Master's official residence) should if possible be reserved for the Order's curia. The new Master, Vincent de Couesnongles, accordingly moved the Historical Institute to the Angelicum, where it remains to this day, with its own library combined with that of the quondam Liturgical Institute to form an invaluable instrument of research. Archivum has appeared regularly every year since 1931, together with one volume so far of Complementa, the Newsletter has appeared every year since 1992, and to date (Fall 2006) 32 volumes of Dissertationes have been published and 29 volumes of Monumenta.