Wednesday primary source #3: mystery documents

You'll have to page this collection of documents from Special Collections to see what treasures it contains!

Title: France, ancien regime : military and diplomatic
letters and documents, 1696-1791.
Physical Description: .5 linear ft. (176 items)
Summary: 176 documents, mainly concerning foreign affairs and
military matters.
Note: Purchase, 1984. Previously in the collection of Sir
Thomas Phillipps. Accession # 1984-125.
Note: In French.
Indexes: Partial list of signers in collection file.
Subject (LC): France--Foreign relations--1643-1715.
Subject (LC): France--Foreign relations--1715-1793.
Subject (LC): France--History, Military--18th century.
Subject (Other): CHR 17th century--France.
Subject (Other): CHR 18th century--France.
Added author: Phillipps, Thomas, Sir, 1792-1872, collector.
Repository address: Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford Univ.
Libraries, Stanford, CA 94305.

SPEC-COLL CALL NUMBER COPY LOCATION
1)M1368 1T MANUSCRIPT

Super-Enlightenment

Recently, the Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) launched the Super-Enlightenment Web site in beta version at:

http://collections.stanford.edu/supere/

You can also use these shorter URLs to access the site:

http://super-e.stanford.edu/

http://superenlightenment.stanford.edu/

What It Contains

This collection assembles about three dozen rare works in French written between 1716 and 1835, covering mythology, alchemy, religion, free-masonry, science, and other topics. Rather than rejecting what we commonly think of as Enlightenment ideas and paradigms, these esoteric texts explore many of the same themes, representing what Dan Edelstein, assistant professor of Stanford's French and Italian department and faculty coordinator of this site, calls "the dark side of the Enlightenment" -- or "Super-Enlightenment." We hope that making these works available as a searchable corpus (after they have long been pushed to the margins) will open up new paths of research for scholars at Stanford and around the world. Historians, literary scholars, and art historians are some of the target audiences for this resource.

This text collection currently consists of 64 volumes, both held by SULAIR and gathered from other library collections, that are presented as searchable PDFs. Yet Super-E is not only a collection of primary sources, it also offers scholarly materials for the researcher and teacher. Nine bio-bibliographical essays by specialists in the field and Professor Edelstein's brief introduction offer historical and theoretical background to the project and to the works and authors that it showcases. Users can also sort the texts by author, date, and by the following thematic topics: Art and Architecture, Illuminism and Science, Masonry, Mythology, Orientalism, and Reform and Revolution

How to Search the Collection

The current beta release does not offer full-text searching across all volumes, however current users can download the PDFs for each volume and search them separately. Future releases will include the search capabilities currently under active development by Digital Library Systems and Services that will allow searching across all of SULAIR's scanned texts.

... this announcement was also posted on Speaking of Computers, the technology and e-resources newsletter of SULAIR.

Wednesday primary source #2 - guillotined

 
11 volumes containing a daily account of 2790 people
who were guillotined in Paris during the years from
August 1792- 25 frimaire an III.   It is basically a
biographical dictionary of victims of the Revolution,
offering names and dates, as well as the occupations
and where they met their fate. This publication was
a periodical, published approximately every two weeks.

Organization: France. Tribunal révolutionnaire.
Title: Liste générale et très-exacte des tous ceux qui ont
été condamnés à mort par le Tribunal
révolutionnaire établi à Paris depuis le
commencement de la révolution jusqu'à la suppression
du tribunal, contenant leurs noms, prénoms, âges,
qualités et demeures, lieux de leurs naissances et de
 leurs départemens ...
 Imprint: Paris, Channaud [etc.] l'an troisième [1794-95]
Physical Description: 11 nos in 1 v. 20 cm.
 Note: Title varies.
Subject (LC): France--History--Revolution, 1789-1799.

SPEC-COLL--  Location: RARE-BOOKS    
DC183.5 .F7 1794                          

President of the BnF visits Stanford

Bruno Racine, the president of the Bibliotheque nationale de France, will be visiting Stanford on Wednesday, April 8. He will give a talk entitled "Books, Libraries, and the Bibliotheque nationale de France: A Look Forward" at 4:30 in the Bender Room on the 5th floor of Green Library.

I hope that you can all attend this event - Racine has held many important French cultural positions, including head of the Centre Pompidou and of the Academie de France à Rome, and is also the author of several novels and works of non-fiction.

For more information, please see the invitation.

M. Racine will be meeting with faculty and grad students on April 8 from 10:30-11:30 in the Ida Green Room (in the Director's suite in the library, to your left as you enter the Bing Wing). If you would like to join us, please let me know.

interesting primary sources in SULAIR...

My job is filled with discoveries - which often involve Stanford Libraries' collections. From now on I'll be regularly posting about interesting primary sources found in the depths of Special Collections. Often these items are hard to locate, either because they are minimally catalogued, or because they have funny call numbers like Misc (Miscellaneous) and MSS (Manuscript) or MSS Codex (Manuscript codex - for manuscripts bound in book form).

Some of these sources I find serendipitously as I read book vendors' detailed catalogs and check to see if we have various items on offer. Our star semi-retired rare books cataloger, Barry Hinman, also occasionally sends my way citations of books and other materials that he thinks I might like to know about. These will be the main sources for a weekly series of blog posts about hidden French and Italian primary sources here at Stanford.

Here's the first - 11 manuscript volumes containing records of an 18th century French fund for the state to tax and repay rentes.

Organization: France. Sovereigns, etc., 1715-1774 (Louis XV).
Title: Caisse generale des amortissements etablie par Edit
du Mois de Decembre 1764, 1766-1775.
Related e-resource: Finding aid available online
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf5x0nb1cd
Physical Description: 11 v.
Summary: These are the records of a fund operated between 1764
and 1770 to receive a tax on "rentiers" by which
"rentes" themselves were to be reimbursed, thus
relieving the burden of bond repayment which otherwise
fell on ordinary crown revenues.
Note: Purchased, 1977.
Subject (LC): Social history--18th century.
Subject (LC): France--History--Louis XV, 1715-1774.
Subject (Other): CHR 18th century--France.
Repository address: Dept. of Special Collections Stanford Univ. Libraries
Stanford, CA 94305.

SPEC-COLL CALL NUMBER COPY LOCATION
1)MSS CODEX M0301 F 1T MANUSCRIPT