Selling Enlightenment

Dr Mark Curran, Munby Fellow, ‘Beyond the forbidden best-sellers of pre-Revolutionary France’

Wednesday, 16 May, Morison Room, Cambridge University Library, 5:00 pm. Tea from 4:30 pm before the lecture.

If a non-existent book is never sent to an atypical bookseller, could it cause a revolution? Dr Mark Curran has spent the past five years working on The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769-1794 project, an initiative which utilises cutting edge database technology to map the trade of the Swiss publishers the Société typographique de Neuchâtel. The resulting database, due to go live on-line at the end of this month, provides a remarkable insight into the francophone book trade of the late-eighteenth century. Dr. Curran will be talking about the database, as well as the major conclusions of his forthcoming Historical Journal article ‘Beyond the Forbidden Best-Sellers of pre-Revolutionary France’ and monograph Selling Enlightenment. His debut academic article Mettons toujours Londres was recently awarded the French History article prize, and his first book ‘Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment in pre-Revolutionary Europe’ will be published by the Royal Historical Society next this summer.

Mark Curran – The Geography and Structure of the Late Eighteenth-Century Book Trade from Cultures of Knowledge on Vimeo.

Paper delivered by Mark Curran at ‘Intellectual Geography: Comparative Studies, 1550-1700′, an international conference held at the University of Oxford on 5-7 September 2011 (history.ox.ac.uk/intellectualgeography/). The conference was an event of ‘Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters’ (culturesofknowledge.org), a research project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Things look just a little bit different around here? Well, since I’ve started as Munby Fellow in Bibliography at the University of Cambridge a lot has happened. I’m no longer concentrating solely on the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) project, so I’m expanding the focus of this blog to reflect that and, hopefully, to be of more general interest to those interested in eighteenth-century books, the Enlightenment and digital humanities. I’ll still (and indeed much more frequently) be giving news about the FBTEE database launch, and especially Selling Enlightenment, my monograph that explains and builds upon the database. But, the place should have more of a research blog feel. I may even talk a little about the Christian Enlightenment, which I’m especially interested in.

Simon Burrows intends to launch a FBTEE project blog at some point, and I’ll keep you all informed about that once it happens.

Oh, and forgive and under-construction-ness apparent in the next few days.

Onwards, upwards!

So, Washington down (report card to come), Oxford is next up – for the Intellectual Geography: Comparative Studies, 1550-1700 conference the 5-7 September 2011 at St Anne’s College.

Ok, so we are about 70 years in time and about 5 pixels in space (judging from the banner on the above link, at least) outside the conference remit, but we’ll do our best to fit in…

What is ‘intellectual geography’? I hear you asking. According to the conference site:

‘At its most basic and descriptive level, it aims simply to map out the distribution of intellectual activity in space and time. For this purpose, a variety of data – from correspondence networks, matriculation lists, library or printers’ catalogues, subject bibliographies, and professorial prosopographies, to travel diaries – can be aggregated to help localize intellectual traditions spatially, establish the geographical scope of their influence, chart the media and routes through which they communicated with other centres, and plot their rise and fall relative to neighbours and competitors.’

Sounds right up our street. I’ll try and tweet and perhaps blog, as the schedule looks brilliant, if a little intimidating!

So, we’re giving a talk, the 13th July, at the Library of Congress – just before the  SHARP conference in Washington D.C.

Thanks to Carol Armbruster for such a kindly blurb, can’t wait…

Database on French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe to be Discussed

Digital Humanities Project is for the Study of the Books and Ideas of Late 18th-century Europe

The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project uses database technology to map the trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a celebrated European publishing house that operated between 1769 and 1794. The STN’s archives can be considered a representative source for studying the history of the book trade and dissemination of ideas in late Enlightenment Europe. The use of database technology with a data source as rich as the STN archives will significantly enhance the research use of the notable collection of original material held at the Library of Congress.

The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project is the subject of a discussion on Wednesday, July 13, at 2 p.m. in the Montpelier Room, located on the sixth floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. The program, sponsored by the Center for the Book, the European Division and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, is free and open to the public; no tickets are required.

Simon Burrows, the project’s director, and Mark Curran, research fellow, will lead the discussion.

Situated in Switzerland, operating outside France and its system of censorship and book privileges, the STN was able to deal in all genres of books, including illegal and pirate editions banned in France. The STN also had clients in cities all over Europe, including major booksellers and publishers in Dublin, London, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Madrid, Warsaw and Naples, as well as the German- and French-speaking countries.

This project will map the French book trade across late-Enlightenment Europe in order to chart best-selling texts and authors; reading tastes across Europe; changing patterns of demand over time; and networks of exchange in the print trade. As French was the international language of the period, and widely read by Europe’s elites, the project will be of interest to all scholars of the European Enlightenment, not merely those with interests in French history and literature. The database of the book trade created by the project will be freely available to all users and the wider academic community later this year at chop.leeds.ac.uk/stn/ .

Simon Burrows is professor of modern European history at the University of Leeds and principal investigator for the AHRC-funded French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project. Mark Curran, currently a research fellow in the School of History at the University of Leeds, will shortly be taking up the Munby fellowship in bibliography at the University of Cambridge.

Since its creation by Congress in 1977 to “stimulate public interest in books and reading,” the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress (www.Read.gov/cfb/) has become a major national force for reading and literacy promotion. A public-private partnership, it sponsors educational programs that reach readers of all ages, nationally and internationally. The center provides leadership for 52 affiliated state centers for the book (including the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands) and nonprofit reading-promotion partners and plays a key role in the Library’s annual National Book Festival. It also oversees the Library’s Read.gov website and administers the Library’s Young Readers Center.