One of the most important features of the St Andrews French project has been the degree to which it has cast its search wide, to include all of the major research collections in Europe and North America. This autumn this work will continue with work in the richest collections in Scandinavia. In November 2006 one member of the project team will be despatched to Copenhagen, to search the holdings of the Copenhagen Royal Library. This we already know to be a substantial collection of French material, though part of the work to be done will include a full search of the catalogues in the library itself.

Meanwhile a further member of the project team will visit Sweden, to view high priority books in three important collections, in Stockholm, Norrköping and Uppsala.

We are extremely grateful to the library staff in these libraries who have been extremely helpful in helping us compile a survey of their collections in advance of these visits.

Dr Malcolm Walsby has now taken over as Manager of the St Andrews French Book Project, following the departure of Dr Alexander Wilkinson to a new position at University College, Dublin.

Dr Walsby brings to the position four years of experience working for the project in Paris, latterly at Project Co-ordinator, France. In this position he took responsibility for organising all the project Field work in French libraries, as well as managing the work of other associated staff working for the project in Paris.

Dr Walsby will now take responsibility for seeing the project through to completion and publication in the autumn of 2007.

His position in Paris for the final year of the project grant has been taken by Sara Barker, a recently completed Ph.D student of the University of St Andrews, who has long experience working with the project team. We wish both well in their new responsibilities.

The project team has just completed a further two weeks of field work in German libraries. In a tour that took in important collections in both north and southern Germany, Professor Pettegree and Dr Walsby visited six collections, based first in Wolfenbüttel, and latterly in Stuttgart. This was a third visit back to the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, which possesses an extraordinarily rich collection of French material, including many unique items. This first week also included a return visit to the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek in Halle and first visits to the SUB Göttingen, and to the extraordinary collection of musical part book in Kassel.

The second week concentrated largely on the superb collections of the Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart, which possesses the best collection of French Bibles outside France, as well as many other precious and unique items. Professor Pettegree and Dr Walsby also visited two other important collections in Baden Württemberg, at the universities of Tübingen and Mannheim.

The project has now surveyed over two dozen of the largest collections of French books in Germany, work that is emerging as an important distinctive feature of the project. It is increasingly clear that the French books that made their way to Germany in the 16th century had a very distinctive profile; consequently many books now listed in our bibliography survive only in German libraries.

The project team hopes to continue this work with a visit to Berlin later in the year.

Professor Andrew Pettegree will give a number of papers away from St Andrews during the course of the Autumn. On the 10th October he will speak to the Cambridge Early Modern Seminar on “The Protestant Reformation and the Problem of Conversion”. On Thursday the 23rd of November he will give the Stenton Lecture on “The Growth of the Provincial Press in 16th century Europe”. Finally, on the 4th of November he will also chair a session at a one day conference sponsered by the Royal Historical Society entitled, “Historians and Bibliographers in Conversation”. For more information see: http://www.rhs.ac.uk

For the summer field trip of 2006, the project team embarked on its most ambitious programme of library visits yet. This year, the last of focussed field work, the project team split into four different groups to maximise its coverage of high priority libraries.

Project Manager Dr Alexander Wilkinson led a four week visit to Belgium. Working first with Philip John and then with Dr Matthew Hall, he worked extensively in the important collections of Brussels and Liège. He and Philip John completed work on the remaining rare items in Ghent University Library and visited for the first time the Abbey of Maredsous. In the last week of the trip the focus shifted to Antwerp, when Dr Wilkinson and Dr Hall worked in three important collections: the Museum Plantin-Moretus, the Stadsbibliothek and the Ruusbroec collection in the University Library.

This trip fundamentally advanced our coverage of French language pamphlet literature published in the Low Countries, which will be a especially valuable part of the project when published.

Meanwhile Project Research Fellow Sara Barker led a two week trip to Grenoble. She was accompanied by research students Graeme Kemp and Marianne Stewart, both making their first contribution to field work. In two weeks they saw over 350 items in this important collection.

Graeme Kemp and Marianne Stewart then joined Philip John for a further week of work in the libraries of Normandy. These are collections we have visited before, and they were able to see all the remaining high priority items in Caen, Valognes, Cherbourg and Bayeux. Philip John then joined Sara Barker for a further week of work in Le Mans, another important collection that we have visited on two previous occasions.

Professor Andrew Pettegree and Dr Malcolm Walsby, the Project Manager for France, worked for four weeks in the south west of France. This trip was centred on Bordeaux, an important collection visited in the early stages of the project. They were able both to increase substantially the known works in this collection, and see several hundred high priority items. In addition they travelled south, to take in collections at Pau, Carcassonne, Toulouse and Perpignan, and north, to collections at Angoulême, Limoges¸ Périgueux, Libourne, and Cognac. They also worked several days in La Rochelle, to see the remainder of books in this collection left unseen on a previous visit.

In total we inspected over 4500 books in some thirty different libraries.

This was the last of ten successive summer field trips undertaken by the project team in June and July. During the course of these trips we have visited over 150 libraries in France, and surveyed through correspondence at least another 50 smaller collections. They will be a fundamental part of the new work presented by the completion of the project.

For a full itinerary of libraries visited during field work see the field trip diary