Professor Andrew Pettegree will give a number of invitation papers in the autumn semester in connection with the work of the French Book project. From 27- 30 October he will attend a conference in Rome devoted to the early Reformation in comparative perspective, where he will give a paper on the Early Evangelical Movement in France. On Tuesday 8 November he will give a paper to the Early Modern History Seminar at Oxford entitled ‘The text as crowd. Pamphlets and their readers in sixteenth-century France’. Later that month he will be a guest of the History Department of Trinity College Dublin, where he will he discuss the research method of the French Book project.

Dr Malcolm Walsby will represent the project at a conference hosted by the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance at Tours, 29-30 September 2005. At this conference, devoted to ‘Le berceau du livre imprimé: autour des incunables’, Dr Walsby has been invited to give a paper entitled ‘Un projet européen de recherche et de valorisation du patrimoine écrit, the St Andrews Book Project’.

At the end of the summer Professor Pettegree and Dr Walsby began the work of surveying the very important collections presently located in German libraries with a two week trip to libraries in central and eastern Germany. For the first week, based in Leipzig, they were able to visit the collections in Gotha, Jena, Bautzen, Halle and Dresden, as well as Leipzig itself. German collections prove to be exceptionally strong in works of literature which, it was clear from provenance markings, were often collected contemporaneously. These German collections also allowed us for the first time to inspect many bilingual French and German works which do not survive at all in French libraries.

The second week of the trip was devoted to the enormous collection of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. This collection contains a quite exquisite collection of French materials, including many works of poetry and prose literature that are unique surviving copies. There was also a quite unexpectedly strong run of French political and legal pamphlets.

All in all, in the course of the fortnight Professor Pettegree and Dr Walsby were able to inspect over 1200 books in a total of seven libraries. This makes an important beginning to work in German libraries which we anticipate will be continued in the last two years of the project.

This year the summer field trip concentrated on libraries in central and eastern France. The main focus of our activity was the enormous pamphlet collection of the Bibliothèque Municipale in Grenoble, where the Director, Professor Pettegree, led a team of researchers on a three week trip. The Grenoble BM represented the last great pamphlet collection in France that we had not yet systematically surveyed, and the largest Bibliothèque Municipale collection still to be inspected. During the course of the trip we worked through around 1600 items, including many examples of regional print previously unknown to the project: many indeed were completely new discoveries.Time was also scheduled to make a final trip to the collection of the Bibliothèque Municipale in Lyon, the subject of systematic work for several years. Professor Pettegee and Dr Walsby spent one week there at the beginning of the trip, and Dr Hall and Mr John a second week after the Grenoble expedition. In additional to seeing high priority items not yet inspected, we managed, through the help of the staff, to survey further items recently accessioned in the Chomerat collection. We also surveyed a complete private collection, the Fonds Galle, donated to the Archives Départmentales in Lyon.

In the last week of the field trip shorter visits were also accomplished to other important collections in central France, including Moulins, Roanne, Autun, Valence, Cluny, and Bourg-en-Bresse. In Moulins and Roanne we continued work begun during a spring trip that also achieved a complete survey of relevant items in the BMU Clermont-Ferrand. The collection of the BM in Autun proved to be an exceptionally valuable collection, and in Bourg-en-Bresse we were able, with the help of library staff, to work up an inventory of some 285 items.

Meanwhile the project manager, Dr Wilkinson, continued his work with the collections of the Mazarine Library in Paris, and completed the project survey of the collections of the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris.

Sara Barker also worked for the project, in this case in a number of important collections in Switzerland. Our work with priority items in Geneva and Lausanne was hugely advanced during her four weeks of work for the project.