Book chapters by Helwi Blom
In: Rindert Jagersma, Helwi Blom, Evelien Chayes and Ann-Marie Hansen, Private Libraries and their Documentation, 1665–1830. Studying and Interpreting Sources. Leiden: Brill, 2023
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Goldmines... more This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Goldmines or Minefields? Private Libraries and Their Documentation (1665-1830) * The preparation of this volume has been supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 682022, as well as by the Stichting Ammodo Science Award 2017 for Humanities. See the MEDIATE project website, available online at <www .mediate18.nl>. 1 Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Paris: François Targa, 1627), pp. 27-30 (USTC 6019927). 2 Conrad Gessner, Bibliotheca Universalis (Zürich: Christoph Froschauer, 1545) (USTC 616753). On Gessner's approach to catalogues see Ann Blair, Too Much to Know. Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 163. 3 Louis Jacob, Traicté des plus belles bibliothèques publiques et particulières, qui ont esté, & qui sont à présent dans le monde (Paris: Rolet le Duc, 1644) (USTC 6035314).
in: R. Schlusemann, H. Blom, A. K. Richter and K. Wierzbicka-Trwoga, Top Ten Fictional Narratives in Early Modern Europe Translation, Dissemination and Mediality, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2023
The story of Fortunatus recounts the adventures of a young man from Cyprus setting out to find fa... more The story of Fortunatus recounts the adventures of a young man from Cyprus setting out to find fame and fortune. He literally meets his fortune when he encounters Lady Fortune, who offers him one of the following virtues: wisdom, wealth, strength, health, beauty, or longevity. Fortunatus chooses wealth and receives a magical purse that immediately replenishes the moment any money is withdrawn from it. Later, he also acquires a magical hat that transports the bearer wherever he wants to go. After returning to Cyprus, our hero leads a comfortable life, but upon his death, his two sons, Ampedo and Andolosia, handle his legacy recklessly and both die miserably. The narrative was first published in German and printed in Augsburg in 1509. From there, it spread to many other European linguistic regions. Unlike most titles on the Top Ten list, the early modern editions of Fortunatus do not build on an earlier manuscript tradition, and although the story contains several motives that link it to folktales and medieval travel literature, its main theme echoes the social and economic changes in western Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. Scholars nowadays agree that the Fortunatus narrative originated in southern Germany, possibly in Augsburg or one of the other trading cities in the region. Two different Augsburg citizens have been suggested as authors: Burkhard Zink, who published a chronicle of the city, and Johann Heybler, who commissioned the oldest known edition. There is, however, no concrete evidence pointing to authorship by either man (Roloff 1996, 214-222; Speth 2017). The fact that the first died around 1475 seems to indicate that he could not have been the author, because the termini post quem that have been proposed for Fortunatus are almost all posterior to 1479 (Valckx 1975; Mühlherr 1993; Prager 2004; Speth 2017). The contents of this German "proto-novel" (Speth 2017, 13) comprise elements coming from a wide range of sources from different eras and belonging to various literary genres. While some critics distinguish several layers, for example by considering it a magical and worldly tale that was given a religious or moral colouring, to be later moulded into a romance of adventure, others characterize the composition as a "montage" arranged by a single author (Roloff 1996, 223-227; Speth 2017). The sources and motives that come together in Fortunatus result in a Open Access.
in: in: R. Schlusemann, H. Blom, A. K. Richter and K. Wierzbicka-Trwoga, Top Ten Fictional Narratives in Early Modern Europe Translation, Dissemination and Mediality, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2023
With Floris and Blancheflour, Pierre and Maguelonne belong to the love couples from medieval lite... more With Floris and Blancheflour, Pierre and Maguelonne belong to the love couples from medieval literature whose stories have resonated with audiences from different social, cultural, geographical, and temporal backgrounds. The oldest known version of the story is a French roman in prose that probably dates back to the 1430s. By 1500, it had already been printed multiple times in France, and it quickly found translators in several European vernaculars. In many linguistic regions, the story was destined to a long life in the form of so-called chapbooks and literary adaptations such as plays and penny prints. This chapter aims to study how Pierre et Maguelonne travelled across boundaries and how the story evolved over time. The first part consists of an analytic overview of the spread of the narrative across Europe from its first appearance until 1800. Although this overview, which complements and corrects existing surveys and studies, 1 focuses on the printed tradition, the manuscript tradition that existed alongside it will also be considered. 2 The second part will zoom in on developments in the production of reprints and new editions in different linguistic regions during the early modern period. What are the similarities and the differences in the contents, the material features, and the reception of chapbook editions of Pierre et Maguelonne in different areas? It will be argued that, while the reprints increasingly took the characteristics of a production at the lowest possible cost, they also reveal the preoccupation of early modern publishers of this type of books with updating the presentation of the medieval love story about Pierre de Provence and the beautiful Maguelonne. 3 Note: A special thank you to Marie-Dominique Leclerc, Vicent Pastor i Briones, and Christine Putzo for their contributions to my research on Pierre et Maguelonne. Notably Babbi (2003) and Roudaut (2009). The discussion concentrates on editions of the medieval narrative and leaves aside dramatic adaptations as well as eighteenth-century literary reworkings. The editions discussed in this chapter are referenced in my Bibliography of early modern editions of "Pierre de Provence et la belle Maguelonne" (BPM) at https://uu.academia.edu/HelwiBlom, which serves as an appendix to this chapter. All items have a unique identifier composed of one or more letters and a number. See also Tab. 2 at the end of this chapter.
DANS Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities, V1, 2023
Dataset in DANS Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities, V1.
Appendix to Helwi Blom, ‘Le... more Dataset in DANS Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities, V1.
Appendix to Helwi Blom, ‘Legendary Love. The Wide Appeal of Pierre de Provence et la belle Maguelonne in Early Modern Europe’, in: Rita Schlusemann, Helwi Blom, Anna Katharina Richter and Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga (eds.), Top Ten Fictional Narratives in Early Modern Europe; Translation, Dissemination and Mediality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), pp. 225–258.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110764451-008
in A. der Weduwen, A. Pettegree and G. Kemp (eds), Book Trade Catalogues in Early Modern Europe. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021
Half a century after its first publication, Henri-Jean Martin’s monumental study Livre, pouvoirs ... more Half a century after its first publication, Henri-Jean Martin’s monumental study Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle (1598–1701) still stands out as the most comprehensive work on the seventeenth-century Parisian book world and, as such, it continues to serve as the reference work par excellence for scholars interested in the French book trade in the Grand Siècle. As far as book trade catalogues are concerned, Martin has made ample use of publishers’ and booksellers’ catalogues for his quantitative and qualitative analysis of the production and the distribution of books in the French capital. Other types of contemporary book trade catalogues, such as auction catalogues and other printed catalogues of private collections offered for sale, do, however, play no role of importance in Livre, pouvoirs et société. Martin certainly signals the circulation of old and used books, but since the focus of his study is primarily on the development of the production and distribution of new books and not on the second-hand book market, it discusses neither the scope and nature of this part of the book trade nor the persons who specialised in it.
Up till now, these lacunae in our understanding of the seventeenth-century Parisian book world have not been properly addressed. While, in the last decades of the twentieth century, the phenomena of book auctions and sale catalogues of private libraries have been thoroughly studied in book historical research dedicated to seventeenth-century publishing centres in the Dutch Republic and the British Isles, the two major synthetic studies in the field of the history of the book in early modern France, the Histoire de l’édition française and the Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, barely touch upon this subject. The introduction to Françoise Bléchet’s list of seventeenth and eighteenth-century French sale catalogues held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the collective volume on book sales and book sale catalogues published by Annie Charon and Élisabeth Parinet present valuable data and insights, but that does not change the fact that the French ventes publiques and their relation to the second-hand book trade of the period before 1701 remain largely terra incognita.5
The present article aims to take the reader on a voyage of discovery into this unknown territory and to explore its contours by focusing on a particularly interesting case: the sale of the library of Pierre Briot, a fairly unknown Parisian Protestant, who was active as a translator of English works in the fields of natural history, geography and philosophy. After Briot’s death in 1678, an anonymous publisher produced a sale catalogue of his collection with the imprint ‘Paris, 1679’. In the summer of 2017, I discovered a unique manuscript of the actual sale of Briot’s library in the Médiathèque François-Mitterand in Poitiers. Since then, I have gathered a number of manuscript and printed sources containing information regarding Briot, his library and the circumstances of its sale in 1679. The documentation I collected and that I present in the following pages, sheds light on numerous aspects of the organisation of sales of private book collections in seventeenth-century Paris that have hitherto remained hidden and, as such, it is of importance for the study of the French second-hand book market of that period. I will also argue that the Briot case clearly demonstrates how private collections and catalogues of private library sales played a central role in the early modern Republic of Letters.
in Frédéric Barbier, István Monok and Andrea Seidler (eds), Les bibliothèques et l’économie des connaissances/Bibliotheken und die Ökonomie des Wissens 1450–1850, 2020
in Mary Hammond (ed), The Edinburgh History of Reading 1: Early Readers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020
in Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou and Paul J. Smith, Early Modern Catalogues of Imaginary Books. A Scholarly Anthology. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2020
Parmi les nombreuses publications que nous a laissées le polygraphe français Eustache [II] Le Nob... more Parmi les nombreuses publications que nous a laissées le polygraphe français Eustache [II] Le Noble (1643-1711) se trouve un texte intitulé significativement Le Colporteur de Proserpine. 1 Ce livret fait partie d'un ouvrage périodique publié sous le titre général de L'École du monde nouvelle ou Les Promenades de Mr. Le Noble et parut probablement pour la première fois vers la mi-avril 1699. 2 À cette époque-là Le Noble vivait essentiellement de sa plume. Issu d'une famille noble parvenue à la magistrature de Troyes et ayant fait des études brillantes, il avait épousé en 1648 la fille d'un riche marchand troyen qui lui avait apporté une large dot. Après avoir exercé pendant quelques années comme avocat, Le Noble devint en 1673 conseiller et procureur
in: Mathilde Bombart, Sylvain Cornic, Edwige Keller Rahbé, Michèle Rosellini (eds.), « À qui lira ». Littérature, livre et librairie en France au XVIIe siècle, 2020
in Karine Abiven et Damien Fortin (dir.), « Muses naissantes » Écrits de jeunesse et sociabilité lettrée (1645-1655), Éditions et Presses universitaires de Reims, p. 189-206, 2018
Les écrits rassemblés ici sont les traces les plus tangibles d'un groupe de jeunes auteurs (nés a... more Les écrits rassemblés ici sont les traces les plus tangibles d'un groupe de jeunes auteurs (nés autour de l'année 1620), que les historiens de la littérature ont coutume d’appeler les « Palatins » (ou « Paladins ») de la « Table Ronde » et qui aurait rassemblé Cassandre, Charpentier, Furetière, La Fontaine, Maucroix, Pellisson et Tallemant des Réaux. Plus qu’un témoignage sur une société constituée, leur production qu’on peut situer entre 1645 et 1655 constitue un observatoire privilégié pour analyser leurs manières de se mettre en scène, collectivement et individuellement, à l’entrée dans la « carrière ». Elle permet aussi d’examiner les trajectoires sociales et les options d’écriture qui s’offrent à eux comme autant de possibles.
Au tournant du XVIIe siècle les romans chevaleresques issus des fictions narratives du Moyen Âge,... more Au tournant du XVIIe siècle les romans chevaleresques issus des fictions narratives du Moyen Âge, dont les éditions s’étaient multipliées tout au long du XVIe siècle, commencent à devenir l’apanage des éditeurs de la Bibliothèque bleue de Troyes, notion aussi fameuse que difficile à cerner. Au lieu de constituer un corpus avec des traits bien définis témoignant de choix éditoriaux réalisés en vue d’un large public, les éditions « bleues » du début du XVIIe siècle semblent plutôt témoigner d’une certaine continuité dans la réception des « vieux romans » à l’époque d’Henri IV et de Marie de Médicis.
De « nouveaux lecteurs » pour les « vieux romans » ? Nicolas Bonfons, Benoît Rigaud et l'édition ... more De « nouveaux lecteurs » pour les « vieux romans » ? Nicolas Bonfons, Benoît Rigaud et l'édition de romans de chevalerie à la fin du XVI siècle Type de publication: Article de collectif Collectif: Stratégies d'élargissement du lectorat dans la fiction narrative. XV et XVI siècles Auteur: Blom (Helwi) Résumé: Vers la fin du XVI siècle, deux éditeurs dominaient la production française de romans de chevalerie : Benoît Rigaud à Lyon et Nicolas Bonfons à Paris. Une étude comparative de leurs éditions (titres proposés, mise en livre, éléments péritextuels, aspects matériels) permet d'analyser les stratégies éditoriales développées par ces deux hommes et d'interroger de façon critique les idées reçues sur le développement du marché du livre bon marché et sur le déclin du genre « chevaleresque » à l'époque.
Dissertation by Helwi Blom
PhD Dissertation Utrecht University, 2012
“Vieux romans” et “Grand Siècle” addresses the fortune of medieval romances of chivalry in sevent... more “Vieux romans” et “Grand Siècle” addresses the fortune of medieval romances of chivalry in seventeenth-century France. The expression ‘roman de chevalerie’ (chivalric romance) was first used in 1627. It referred to fictional texts recounting the fantastic exploits of heroic knights in a medieval setting. This means that the literary genre of the ‘roman de chevalerie’ consisted of texts which modern literary historians rarely place under the same umbrella: (prose adaptations of) Arthurian romances, epic Charlemagne romances, adventure romances and (translations and imitations of) Spanish and Italian chivalric stories from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some of these texts can hardly be considered as medieval romances, but to do justice to the point of view of seventeenth-century France we have included them in our studies. Contrary to what many handbooks of literary history claim, the publication of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-1615), translated in French between 1614 and 1618, has by no means put an end to the popularity of the chivalric romance. Research in catalogues of public libraries, auction catalogues and archives has revealed that between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century French printers and booksellers published more than 300 editions of 37 different medieval romances of chivalry. A succinct bibliographical description of the editions and a list of the copies that we have been able to locate can be found in one of the appendixes to our dissertation. The first part of the book concentrates on the production of editions of chivalric romances in the seventeenth century and on the booksellers and the printers that were involved in their publication and distribution. We have examined the development of the production, the sources of the seventeenth-century editions, as well as the modifications that were made to the source texts. An important part of these seventeenth-century editions belonged to the so-called “Bibliothèque bleue” (“blue library”): inexpensive and low-quality reprints of popular books intended for a large public. Historians tend to reserve this term for books and pamphlets printed in Troyes, but we argue that it also applies to some of the romances of chivalry published in other seventeenth-century French printing centres. Besides these cheap publications, relatively expensive editions were issued as well. These were meant for a more sophisticated clientele. The reading public and the reception of medieval chivalric literature constitute the subject of the second part of our thesis. During the seventeenth century, there were several shifts in the composition of the reading public. From 1630-1640 onwards a dichotomy is visible between the traditional readers and new groups of less cultivated readers. The French public of the “Grand Siècle” used and valued the medieval chivalric romances in many different ways, but it has become clear that the three main ingredients of the old romances, heroic actions, love stories and fantastic adventures, have for various reasons appealed to the imagination of a large number of these “modern” readers.
Articles by Helwi Blom
Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes - Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies , 2021
By studying the place held by a selection of “famous” medieval texts in a corpus of 148 private l... more By studying the place held by a selection of “famous” medieval texts in a corpus of 148 private library catalogues published in France between 1650 and 1750, this article examines the perception and reception in the early modern period of a group of works that is nowadays generally referred to as “medieval literature”. The article also aims to propose a critical reflection on the use of printed catalogues of private libraries as a source for literary history and the history of the book.
Annales de Normandie, Feb 22, 2022
in: Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis 27 (2020), pp. 23-43.
Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes. …, Jan 1, 1996
Papers by Helwi Blom
BRILL eBooks, Mar 12, 2024
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Book chapters by Helwi Blom
Appendix to Helwi Blom, ‘Legendary Love. The Wide Appeal of Pierre de Provence et la belle Maguelonne in Early Modern Europe’, in: Rita Schlusemann, Helwi Blom, Anna Katharina Richter and Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga (eds.), Top Ten Fictional Narratives in Early Modern Europe; Translation, Dissemination and Mediality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), pp. 225–258.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110764451-008
Up till now, these lacunae in our understanding of the seventeenth-century Parisian book world have not been properly addressed. While, in the last decades of the twentieth century, the phenomena of book auctions and sale catalogues of private libraries have been thoroughly studied in book historical research dedicated to seventeenth-century publishing centres in the Dutch Republic and the British Isles, the two major synthetic studies in the field of the history of the book in early modern France, the Histoire de l’édition française and the Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, barely touch upon this subject. The introduction to Françoise Bléchet’s list of seventeenth and eighteenth-century French sale catalogues held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the collective volume on book sales and book sale catalogues published by Annie Charon and Élisabeth Parinet present valuable data and insights, but that does not change the fact that the French ventes publiques and their relation to the second-hand book trade of the period before 1701 remain largely terra incognita.5
The present article aims to take the reader on a voyage of discovery into this unknown territory and to explore its contours by focusing on a particularly interesting case: the sale of the library of Pierre Briot, a fairly unknown Parisian Protestant, who was active as a translator of English works in the fields of natural history, geography and philosophy. After Briot’s death in 1678, an anonymous publisher produced a sale catalogue of his collection with the imprint ‘Paris, 1679’. In the summer of 2017, I discovered a unique manuscript of the actual sale of Briot’s library in the Médiathèque François-Mitterand in Poitiers. Since then, I have gathered a number of manuscript and printed sources containing information regarding Briot, his library and the circumstances of its sale in 1679. The documentation I collected and that I present in the following pages, sheds light on numerous aspects of the organisation of sales of private book collections in seventeenth-century Paris that have hitherto remained hidden and, as such, it is of importance for the study of the French second-hand book market of that period. I will also argue that the Briot case clearly demonstrates how private collections and catalogues of private library sales played a central role in the early modern Republic of Letters.
https://books.google.nl/books?id=vMcwQy1WAwUC&lpg=PA51&dq=%22pr%C3%A9sence%20des%20romans%20de%20chevalerie%22&hl=fr&pg=PA51#v=onepage&q=%22pr%C3%A9sence%20des%20romans%20de%20chevalerie%22&f=false
Dissertation by Helwi Blom
Articles by Helwi Blom
Papers by Helwi Blom
Appendix to Helwi Blom, ‘Legendary Love. The Wide Appeal of Pierre de Provence et la belle Maguelonne in Early Modern Europe’, in: Rita Schlusemann, Helwi Blom, Anna Katharina Richter and Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga (eds.), Top Ten Fictional Narratives in Early Modern Europe; Translation, Dissemination and Mediality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), pp. 225–258.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110764451-008
Up till now, these lacunae in our understanding of the seventeenth-century Parisian book world have not been properly addressed. While, in the last decades of the twentieth century, the phenomena of book auctions and sale catalogues of private libraries have been thoroughly studied in book historical research dedicated to seventeenth-century publishing centres in the Dutch Republic and the British Isles, the two major synthetic studies in the field of the history of the book in early modern France, the Histoire de l’édition française and the Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, barely touch upon this subject. The introduction to Françoise Bléchet’s list of seventeenth and eighteenth-century French sale catalogues held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the collective volume on book sales and book sale catalogues published by Annie Charon and Élisabeth Parinet present valuable data and insights, but that does not change the fact that the French ventes publiques and their relation to the second-hand book trade of the period before 1701 remain largely terra incognita.5
The present article aims to take the reader on a voyage of discovery into this unknown territory and to explore its contours by focusing on a particularly interesting case: the sale of the library of Pierre Briot, a fairly unknown Parisian Protestant, who was active as a translator of English works in the fields of natural history, geography and philosophy. After Briot’s death in 1678, an anonymous publisher produced a sale catalogue of his collection with the imprint ‘Paris, 1679’. In the summer of 2017, I discovered a unique manuscript of the actual sale of Briot’s library in the Médiathèque François-Mitterand in Poitiers. Since then, I have gathered a number of manuscript and printed sources containing information regarding Briot, his library and the circumstances of its sale in 1679. The documentation I collected and that I present in the following pages, sheds light on numerous aspects of the organisation of sales of private book collections in seventeenth-century Paris that have hitherto remained hidden and, as such, it is of importance for the study of the French second-hand book market of that period. I will also argue that the Briot case clearly demonstrates how private collections and catalogues of private library sales played a central role in the early modern Republic of Letters.
https://books.google.nl/books?id=vMcwQy1WAwUC&lpg=PA51&dq=%22pr%C3%A9sence%20des%20romans%20de%20chevalerie%22&hl=fr&pg=PA51#v=onepage&q=%22pr%C3%A9sence%20des%20romans%20de%20chevalerie%22&f=false
The ERC-funded project MEDIATE (Middlebrow Enlightenment Disseminating Ideas, Authors and Texts in Europe, 1665-1830) uses book sales catalogues to study the circulation of books and ideas in eighteenth century Europe. MEDIATE uses a bibliometric approach, by drawing on a large corpus of catalogues of private libraries published between 1665 and 1830 in three different regions: the Dutch Republic, France and the British Isles. Since the project database (under construction) contains fully searchable transcriptions and metadata on books and collectors extracted from a corpus of 2000 smaller private library (sales) catalogues, it allows for a large-scale comparative study of the eighteenth-century second-hand book market.
Our paper explores the phenomenon of early modern second-hand book prices through a comparative study of the prices written (and sometimes printed) in the margins of private library catalogues published in the Dutch Republic and in France between 1700 and 1780. In order to put our research in perspective, we discuss some methodological issues and then compare the prices in our catalogues to the sale prices of ‘new books’ found in other sources, such as book trade catalogues and archival material.
Lors de notre exploration historique de la rue Mercière, nous nous concentrerons sur la période entre la fin du XVIe et le milieu du XVIIIe siècle. Nous nous demanderons qui étaient les gens qui fréquentaient cette rue et qu’est-ce qu’ils y faisaient. Nous étudierons ces questions du point de vue de l’histoire du livre, afin de découvrir de quelles façons les gens et les métiers du livre étaient imbriqués dans leur environnement géographique.
Dans notre conférence nous proposons quelques éléments de réponses que nous avons élaborées dans le cadre de notre de thèse de doctorat sur la réception des « vieux romans » au « Grand Siècle ».
The presentation discusses the nature(s) of the source material and its potential for comparative book historical research in a digital age. It also sets out some of the challenges project members meet in defining, harvesting and interpreting the source material and designing metadata fields for the database.
https://www.cerl.org/publications/new_sources_for_book_history