Enlightenment Best-Sellers: the Foreign, the Forbidden and the Forgotten
4:15pm - 6:30pm /
Thursday 8th December 2016
/ Venue: Seminar Room 4 Rendall Building
Type: Seminar /
Category: Research
- 0151 794 2383
- Dr Mark Towsey
- Suitable for: Staff, Students (current, past and prospective), and members of the public with an interest in eighteenth-century studies and book history
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Daniel Mornet’s celebrated question ‘What did the French read before the revolution?’ has both inspired and frustrated historians for over a century. Mornet himself tried to answer it through the study of some 500 private libraries. Other historians have scoured the records of publishing permissions, printed book reviews, will inventories, subscription libraries and reading rooms, or pored over publishers’ archives or booksellers’ catalogues. Yet such varied approaches have returned radically different results, not least because of the complexities of the French book market, which was heavily regulated and contained many degrees of illegal or partially tolerated works. As a result, much of the book trade was hidden from view, and the most interesting books in many libraries may only ever have been catalogued if discovered by the police. Equally, there were many types of books that were seldom recorded in library catalogues or will inventories for other reasons – most likely because they were read or stored elsewhere, or commonly needed replacing through overuse.
Reconstructing popular reading, and recovering the true best-sellers of the old regime therefore requires a different approach and a wider optic. The problem must be approached on an industrial, ‘big data’ scale, and this is now feasible through the application of digital technologies to historical bibliometric research. At the forefront of these efforts is the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project, which having first recorded the entire trade of iconic Swiss publisher the Société typographique de Neuchâtel in database form, is now gathering further data from a complex range of sources spanning all sections of the French book trade in the period 1769-1789: the legal, the pirate and the clandestine, fiction and non-fiction, from religious works to practical manuals, and politics to poetry. As a result, we can now for the first time sketch the contours of the entire francophone book market and identify the true forgotten and forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary France. The results of this survey, at once surprising and provocative, force us to confront a forgotten intellectual universe anew and radically revise our concept of enlightenment culture and society.
About the Speaker
Professor Simon Burrows (Western Sydney University) is a historian of the European enlightenment, the eighteenth-century public sphere and the French revolution. He is known for his innovative studies of the press and French exile writers in Britain and above all as the instigator and principal investigator of the AHRC-funded 'French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe' (FBTEE) database project and has won wide acclaim among historians, literary scholars, bibliographers and digital humanists. The database is now being developed further using seedcorn funding from Western Sydney University (2013-2017) and the Australian Research Council (2016-2017) and is being further developed in partnership with the ERC-funded MEDIATE project at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Simon is a graduate of Oxford University, who began his academic career at the University of Waikato, NZ, (1993-2000) before moving to the University of Leeds, UK. There he was successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Professor of Modern European History from 2000-2012 and the founding Director of the Centre for the Comparative History of Print. He moved to Western Sydney in 2013, where he is now Director of the Digital Humanities Research Group. The author or editor of six books and more than 30 major chapters and articles, Simon is now working on a book arising from the FBTEE project entitled Enlightenment Best-Sellers and co-editing (with Glenn Roe) an essay collection on Digitizing Enlightenment.
Reconstructing popular reading, and recovering the true best-sellers of the old regime therefore requires a different approach and a wider optic. The problem must be approached on an industrial, ‘big data’ scale, and this is now feasible through the application of digital technologies to historical bibliometric research. At the forefront of these efforts is the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project, which having first recorded the entire trade of iconic Swiss publisher the Société typographique de Neuchâtel in database form, is now gathering further data from a complex range of sources spanning all sections of the French book trade in the period 1769-1789: the legal, the pirate and the clandestine, fiction and non-fiction, from religious works to practical manuals, and politics to poetry. As a result, we can now for the first time sketch the contours of the entire francophone book market and identify the true forgotten and forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary France. The results of this survey, at once surprising and provocative, force us to confront a forgotten intellectual universe anew and radically revise our concept of enlightenment culture and society.
About the Speaker
Professor Simon Burrows (Western Sydney University) is a historian of the European enlightenment, the eighteenth-century public sphere and the French revolution. He is known for his innovative studies of the press and French exile writers in Britain and above all as the instigator and principal investigator of the AHRC-funded 'French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe' (FBTEE) database project and has won wide acclaim among historians, literary scholars, bibliographers and digital humanists. The database is now being developed further using seedcorn funding from Western Sydney University (2013-2017) and the Australian Research Council (2016-2017) and is being further developed in partnership with the ERC-funded MEDIATE project at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Simon is a graduate of Oxford University, who began his academic career at the University of Waikato, NZ, (1993-2000) before moving to the University of Leeds, UK. There he was successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Professor of Modern European History from 2000-2012 and the founding Director of the Centre for the Comparative History of Print. He moved to Western Sydney in 2013, where he is now Director of the Digital Humanities Research Group. The author or editor of six books and more than 30 major chapters and articles, Simon is now working on a book arising from the FBTEE project entitled Enlightenment Best-Sellers and co-editing (with Glenn Roe) an essay collection on Digitizing Enlightenment.