New: Napoleon – Letters and Papers: Sources of a Family

The homepage of the resource, showing a brief introduction and a search box. The introduction reads: "About this database There is hardly any other family who influenced European history between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries as much as the Bonapartes did. From the French Revolution to the Treaty of Versailles, the members of this family influenced all spheres of public and private life in politics, art, literature, science, administration, the military, and even landscaping. To this end, they corresponded in writing with all important contemporaries. "Calling all Napoleon researchers and 19th century French historians! You will be pleased to know that a major resource Napoleon – Letters and Papers: Sources of a Family is available as an Open Access resource.

This database, published by de Gruyter, provides access to the Bonaparte family’s autographs and correspondence. It is a valuable source for the study of French and European history, science, and intellectual attitudes from the late 18th century to the early 20th century.

The project will at first publish the correspondence of Prince Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (who would later become Emperor Napoleon III) until 1838, thereby covering the period that the Bonaparte-de Beauharnais family spent in exile at Lake Constance. A 2023 database update will contain his correspondence until 1873. The database will, for the first time, compile his surviving autographs into a collection that will make it possible to reinterpret the emperor’s personality and biography.

Future plans include adding digitised letter and papers of:

  • Hortense de Beauharnais (launch planned for 2024)
  • Eugène de Beauharnais-von Leuchtenberg (launch planned for 2025)
  • Joséphine de Beauharnais (launch planned for 2026)

(Information has been taken from Overview.)

Image of the transcribed letter on the left with the manuscript letter on the right. The snippet reads: "Londres le 30 Juin 1831 Mon cher Général, Je vous remercie bien de votre aimable lettre. J’ai été enchanté d’apprendre que la Duchesse de Frioul avait uni son sort au vôtre, et comme j’ai une tendre vénération et un véritable attachement pour elle, et que j’éprouve pour vous une sincère amitié, je ne sais qui je dois féliciter davantage ; ou le Général Fabvier d’avoir épousé la Duchesse de Frioul, ou la Duchesse de Frioul d’avoir épousé le Général Fabvier. "

“Londres le 30 Juin 1831 […]” In Napoleon – Letters and Papers edited by Christina Egli and Dominik Gügel. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023. https://www.degruyter.com/database/NAPO/entry/nt_18300630_a/html

You can search full-text or browse the resource in various ways, including by place and person. Most of the letters will be in French. The correspondence stretches across Europe, esp. Germany, Switzerland, Italy and England.

The letters are transcribed and can be viewed side-by-side with the digitised manuscript letter.

Biographical annotations helpfully identify people mentioned, even if they used an alias.

While you are here, you might also be interrested in:

Bibliographie de l’histoire de France (BHF) now in Databases A-Z

Update 5 April 2024: This resource is now no longer available as the digitisation project has ceased.

Snippted from Eugène Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830): A woman of the people with a Phrygian cap personifying the concept of Liberty leads a varied group of people forward over a barricade and the bodies of the fallen.

Snippet from Eugène Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830)

Are you looking for critical readings on French history? The Bibliographie de l’histoire de France (formerly Bibliographie annuelle de l‘histoire de France) will be able to help you.

BHF is a freely accessible bibliographic and historiographical tool for anyone interested in the history of France. It indexes a large number of French and foreign journals and lists articles, monographs, collective works (whose content is systematically detailed) and theses as well as websites relating to the history of France from the fifth century to 1995.

Please note that this is a work in progress. The paper volumes (1953 to 2012) will be gradually added online.

You can browse by author, quoted person / organisation, subject, period and geographical location:

screenshot from BHF showing advanced search: quoted person/ organisation, author, language, subject, geographical location, period.This resource is now listed in Databases A-Z > History > Finding Critical Literature and will very shortly be in SOLO also.

While you are here:

Check out our guides to

New Books Display – February 2023

Currently on our New Books Display for the month of February, you can find a wide selection of the latest additions to the History Faculty Library’s collection, covering a range of historical periods and subject matter. Several items are featured below, along with a short summary of their contents. Click the photo to be taken to the item’s SOLO record. All NBD items can be borrowed at the Circulation desk in the Lower Camera reading room.

The Mughals and the Sufis: Islam and Political Imagination in India, 1500-1750 by University of Chicago Professor Muzaffar Alam, presents the author’s findings through a critical study of a large number of contemporary Persian texts, court chronicles, epistolary collections, and biographies of Sufi mystics. Professor Alam examines the complexities in the relationship between Mughal political culture and the two dominant strains of Islam’s Sufi traditions in South Asia. Muzaffar Alam analyses the interplay of these elements, their negotiation and struggle for resolution via conflict and coordination, and their longer-term outcomes as the empire followed its own political and cultural trajectory as it shifted from the more liberal outlook of Emperor Akbar “The Great” (r. 1556-1605) to the more rigid attitudes of his great-grandson, Aurangzeb Alamgir (r. 1658-1701). Alam brings to light many new and underutilized sources relevant to the religious and cultural history of the Mughals and reinterprets well-known sources from a new perspective to provide one of the most detailed and nuanced portraits of Indian Islam under the Mughal Empire available today.

The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Dr Max Skjönsberg examines the development of how the idea of a political party was viewed in the eighteenth century, at a time when some of the core components of modern, representative politics were being trialled. From Bolingbroke to Burke, political thinkers regarded party as a fundamental concept of politics, especially in the parliamentary system of Britain. In the eighteenth century, the concept of a political party was usually understood as a set of flexible and evolving principles, associated with names and traditions, which categorised and managed political actors, voters, and commentators. This book seeks to demonstrate that the idea of party as ideological unity is not purely a nineteenth- or twentieth-century phenomenon, but can be traced to its roots in the eighteenth century. Also available as an eBook through Cambridge Core, accessible once you are signed into SOLO via your Single Sign On.

 From Near and Far: a Transnational History of France by historian Tyler Stovall relates the history of modern France from the French Revolution to the present. The work considers how the history of France interacts with both the broader history of the world and the local histories of French communities, examining the impacts of such figures as Karl Marx, Ho Chi Minh, Paul Gauguin, and Josephine Baker, alongside the rise of haute couture and contemporary art movements. Particularly, the nation’s relationship with Europe, the United States, and the French colonial empire is contextualized and examined in depth. This ‘transnational’ approach to the history of modern France allows Dr. Stovall to explain how the theme of universalism, so central to modern French culture, has manifested itself in different ways over the last few centuries. Furthermore, it emphasizes the importance of historical narrative both within and outside the boundaries of the nation. From Near and Far therefore situates the reader in a vision of France that is simultaneously global and local.

The Dutch Overseas Empire: 1600-1800 by Pieter C. Emmer and Jos J. L. Gommans is a new work that attempts to answer the question of how the Dutch empire compared to other imperial enterprises, and how it was experienced by the indigenous peoples who became a part of its colonial power. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic emerged at the centre of a global empire that stretched along the edges of continents. In this empire, ideas of religious tolerance and scientific curiosity went hand in hand with severe political and economic exploitation of the local populations through violence and slavery. This pioneering history of the early modern Dutch Empire, encompassing two centuries, provides for the first time a comparative and indigenous perspective on Dutch overseas expansion. As well as the impact of the empire on the economy and society in the Dutch Republic itself, it also offers a fascinating window into the contemporary societies of Asia, Africa and the Americas: through their interactions, we see the effect of the Dutch overseas empire on processes of early modern globalization. Also available electronically through Cambridge Core, accessed via SOLO.

The Witches of St. Osyth: persecution, betrayal and murder in Elizabethan England by University of Exeter historian Marion Gibson is an account of witch trials in Essex (1581-2). Despite the history of English witchcraft and documented witch hunts and trials being studied extensively, the events are St. Osyth have been overlooked in previous scholarship. These accusations caused a destructive wave of persecution which tore apart this Essex community. Using fresh archival sources that pertain not only to the village of St. Osyth itself, but also its neighbouring hamlets, Gibson offers a comprehensive exploration into the sixteen women and one man who were accusd of practicing sorcery in addition to posing provocative and relevant questions about the way history is recollected and interpreted. Combining landscape fieldwork and readings of crucial documents, the author skilfully unlocks the poignant personal histories of those whose voices have been lost to history. Also available electronically through Cambridge Core, accessible through your SOLO account.

Queens of the age of Chivalry: England’s fourteenth-century Consorts, 1299-1409 by Alison Weir is the newest work by well-known public historian Weir, whose expertise lies in both medieval and post-medieval biography and historical fiction of the royalty of England, particularly when it comes to the lesser documented lives of female figures. Medieval queens were seen as mere dynastic trophies and political pawns, yet many of the Plantagenet queens of the High Middle Ages dramatically broke away from the restrictions imposed on them and wielded considerable influence over the male courtly figures who surrounded them, as well as the kingdom as a whole. Using personal letters and other vivid primary sources, Weir evokes the lives of five of these remarkable queens of the chivalric age: Marguerite of France, Isabella of France, Philippa of Hainault, Anne of Bohemia and Isabella of Valois. Each of these women lived through a period which oversaw some of the most environmentally and politically turbulent events in English and wider European history, including the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Hundred Years War against France and baronial civil wars against their own monarchy. The turbulence of the fourteenth-century, and these Queen’s role in it, set the stage for the later dramatic events of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to unfold as the Middle Ages drew to a close and Europe entered the early modern period.

On Savage Shores: how Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by University of Sheffield historian Dr. Caroline Dodds Pennock. This work has grown out of her cutting edge researches into the transatlantic journeys and exploration of Indigenous Mesoamerican and North American peoples during the sixteenth century. Although the reason for this was often due to the slave trade, Pennock documents other reasons for these individual’s travels to Europe – as diplomats, merchants and explorers. Pennock presents the story of the Brazilian king who met Henry VIII; the Aztecs who mocked up human sacrifice at the court of Charles V; the Inuk baby who was put on show in a London pub; the children of Indigenous American mothers and Spanish fathers who then returned to Spain – as well as the many servants employed by Europeans of every rank. The people of the Americas were regarded as exotic and were marginalised by European society; but their interactions, worldviews, and cultures still had a profound impact on European civilisation. Drawing on first-hand account of their surviving literature and poetry, as well as European eyewitness accounts, Pennock gives us a sweeping and monumental presentation of Indigenous American presence in early modern Europe.

Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Northern Europe 1080-1350: A Sourcebook is an edited collection with contributions by several social historians, designed to introduce researchers to the everyday lives of Jewish people living in the German Empire, northern France, and England from the 11th to the mid-14th centuries. The volume consists of translations of primary sources written by or about medieval Jews. Each source is accompanied by an introduction that provides it’s historical context. Through the sources, readers can become familiar with the spaces frequented by medieval Jewish Europeans, their daily practices and rituals, and their worldview and wider culture. The subject matter ranges from culinary preferences, garments, objects, and communal buildings and relationships. The documents testify to how Sabbath and holidays were enacted, weddings and births celebrated, and the mourning of the dead. Some of the sources focus on the relationships they had with their Christian neighbours, local authorities, and the Christian Church, while others shed light on their economic activities and professional life.

Trial until 16 Nov: ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Le Monde And Global Newsstream

We are trialling two Proquest products until 16th November 2021.

Global Newsstream contains full text articles from over 3,000 news sources, providing current coverage from many sources as well as archives extending back to the 1980s. Included in it are a number of key UK, US and international titles such as The Guardian, The New York Times, El Mundo and Le Monde (2011 up to the present). This is the second trial this year of this database.

The historical archive of Le Monde – one of the newspapers of record for France – is now available in full-page digital image format from Proquest. We trialled this earlier in the year but the archive was not yet complete. This is the complete archive 1944-2000. It is cross-searchable with Global Newsstream.

The trials are taking place in Weeks 2-5 from Monday 18th October until Tuesday 16th November. Any feedback to nick.hearn@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Trials: Le Monde; Al-Ahram Digital Archive (1875-2020); Global Newsstream

Oxford historians are invited to trial the following newspaper resources. You will need SSO for off-campus access.

Global Newsstream (trial until 19 May 2021)

Global Newsstream contains full text articles from over 3,000 news sources, providing current coverage from many sources as well as archives extending back to the 1980s. Included are a number of key UK, US and international titles such as the Guardian, The New York Times, El Mundo and Le Monde.

Global Newsstream’s coverage of Le Monde from 2011 to the present complements ProQuest’s historical archive of Le Monde from 1944 to 2000. As both databases are on the ProQuest platform the two databases are cross-searchable. The trial of Global Newsstream will run for the same time as the trial of Le Monde (Historical archive) until 19 May 2021.

Please note that as only 25% of the historical archive of Le Monde is available for the current trial; there will be another trial of both databases in September 2021 (when the Le Monde historical archive database will be complete).

Please send any feedback to nick.hearn@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Le Monde (trial until 19 May 2021)  

The historical archive of Le Monde – one of the newspapers of record for France – is now available in full-page digital image format from Proquest. The period covered is from the foundation of Le Monde in 1944 up to 2000. It should be noted that only 25% of the content of this database is currently available. It is cross-searchable with Global Newsstream (also a ProQuest product) which covers Le Monde from 2011 up to the present (and also includes a range of other key UK, US and other international newspapers).

The Bodleian Libraries trial will end on 19 May. Another trial of both databases will be held in September 2021 when the Le Monde historical archive will be complete.

Please send any feedback to nick.hearn@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Al-Ahram Digital Archive (1875-2020) (trial until 15 May)

Founded in 1875, Al-Ahram (الأهرام‎) is one of the most prominent Arabic newspapers in the Middle East, with a legacy as Egypt’s most authoritative and influential national daily. Al-Ahram established itself as a high-quality journalistic venture during the mid-20th century reporting across the political, social, economic and cultural scope of the nation. After President Nasser nationalized the Egyptian press in 1960, readers generally considered the paper the de facto voice of the central government. Al-Ahram has long featured contributions from many of the Arab world’s most important literary figures and intellectuals: Naguib Mahfouz, Edward Said, Yusuf Idris, Taha Hussein, Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, and Azmi Bishara among them, as well as nationalist leaders such as Mustafa Kamil and Saad Zaghlul. Influential forward-leaning contemporary writers such as Sabah Hamamou are also affiliated with the paper. The newspaper over its history successfully expanded to circulate content from around the world, printing international editions as well as Arabic-language editions of the daily. The Al-Ahram Digital Archive features full page-level digitization, with page-views and searchable text. It offers scholars Arabic and English interfaces, options to download or print pages in high resolution, and features to crowd-source improvements to the OCRed text.

Please send feedback to lydia.wright@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Library update 21/5: etextbooks, Numérique Premium trial, Sources Chrétiennes Online

In today’s update, we have news of some etextbook availability, a trial of French ebooks and a new purchase of interest to church historians.

Use SSO for remote access as usual.

VitalSource is a supplier of ebooks and etextbooks to individuals. https://www.vitalsource.com/
They are offering up to 7 free rental for UK students and academics until the end of June due to the pandemic on their Bookshelf site, as long as you sign up with your .ox.ac.uk address. Bookshelf is a sub-set of VitalSource’s complete content. Records are NOT on SOLO.

Kortext (access until June 30, 2020). Another etextbook supplier. Includes The Oxford World Classics series and a selection of other e-books and e-textbooks. Access and SOLO loading is still in process. Not hugely useful for history, compared to other subjects, but it includes e.g. E. Said’s Culture and Imperialism or P. Marshall’s Reformation England 1480-1642. Records in SOLO will be very brief and not very accurate! Best to do a keyword search.

Numérique Premium (trial until 12/6): a French Humanities e-book collection. It contains about 1,500 French-language Humanities ebooks. Access the resource via SOLO but note that records of individual ebooks are NOT on SOLO. Let Isabel Holowaty know if this is useful.

Sources Chrétiennes Online (SCO), purchased by Classics and Theology colleagues. Access the resource via SOLO. The series consists of critical editions of Christian texts in Greek and Latin, but also in oriental languages, such as Syriac, Armenian and Georgian, dating from the first 1,400 years of the Church, accompanied by a French translation as well as an introduction and notes.

Trial until 18 May 2020: Droz ebooks: Humanisme et Renaissance – Calvin

Colleagues in the Taylor Institution Library have set up trials to some online Droz French resources. Two of these will be of interest to early modern history, history of the book, intellectual history, religious history, and European history. You will need SSO for remote access. Please send feedback to isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Humanisme et Renaissance

The Droz Humanisme et Renaissance collection offers a collection of sources and studies on Humanism (Politien, Ficin, Erasmus, Budé…), the French Reformation (Lefèvre d’Etaples, Calvin, Farel, Beza…) and the Renaissance (literary and artistic, Hieronymus Bosch or Rabelais, Ronsard or Primaticcio), as well as the medicine, science, philosophy, book history, and all forms of knowledge and human activity from the long sixteenth century, roughly from 1450 to the death of Henry IV in 1610, the threshold of the classical age.

Calvin

This portal presents all the texts by or about John Calvin which have been published by the Librairie Droz from 1960 to 2012, with an initial focus on Geneva, Calvin, and the beginnings of the French evangelical movement with Lefèvre d’Etaples and Marguerite de Navarre.

Related resources already available in Oxford:

Anti-Calvin

This database comprises the writings of French Catholics against the doctrines of John Calvin (1509-1564) and other protestant leaders. France was a major centre in the clash between Catholics and Protestants during the sixteenth century. Much of the Protestant literature was in French in the hopes of converting the French people. In response, the Catholic Church preserved its position in France with these documents. This archive includes both sixteenth-century attacks on Calvinism and Protestantism as well as defences of the Catholic doctrine.

Huguenots

This collection offers a comprehensive survey of the original writings of the French Huguenot authors, from the first stirrings of radical dissent in the 1530s through to the end of the century. The selection privileges first and foremost original writings of authors writing within France and for an exclusively French audience. Thus whereas Calvin’s Genevan writings are not included, the tracts penned by Theodore de Bèze as part of the polemic exchange during the Colloquy of Poissy (1561) do appear here.

All told the writings collected here reveal an intellectually vibrant movement, meeting unprecedented challenges and later hardship with that mixture of confidence, aggression, and resolution in the face of adversity that characterises Calvinist churches of this era throughout Europe.

Access to Early European Books 5-16 until 31 May 2020

ProQuest have kindly given Oxford researchers free temporary access to Early European Books Collections 5-16 until 31 May 2020. SSO is required for off-campus access.

Collections 5-16 draw mostly material held at Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) but also at Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen and the Wellcome Library in London. It provides access to early printed European collections published between 1450 and 1700.

Some collections are themed:

Collection 16 – French Culture in the Early Modern Period – From the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)

Collection 15 – Revolution and Reformation: Early Modern Science and Religion – From the Wellcome Library (London), the Kongelige Bibliotek (Copenhagen), the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague) and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Florence).

All EEB collections can be cross-searched.  You can also cross-search with Early English Books Online (EEBO) (SSO required for off-campus access).

You have a number of searching and browsing options, including by subject. You can view the documents in thumbnail, Full View and see the full metadata description. Early European Books can now also be analysed visually with the new Interactive Historical Map. Check out the useful EEB LibGuide to learn more about the collection and how to use it.

Please note that book-level details are not in SOLO. You will need to access EEB directly to search for a particular titles.

After 31 May 2020, researchers will continue to have access to EEB Collections 1-4.

Trial until 25 March: Retronews

We are inviting researchers interested in French historical newspapers to trial Retronews.

Retronews is a new archive offered by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and provides access to 600 French news titles published between 1631 and 1950.  Some of these newspapers used to be freely available on Gallica but can now only be accessed through Retronews.

Just over half of the titles are published in Paris with the rest being regional French titles and 5 from Algeria. Titles include: Le Matin (1884-1944), Le Petit Parisien (1876-1944), Le Temps (1861-1942), Gazette nationale ou le Monitor universel (1789-1901).

Different kinds of keyword search are offered. Extra features include filtering by theme, historical period and place of publication. The database comes with three introductory tutorials.

We don’t yet know when the trial expires, but please send feedback to Isabel Holowaty (isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) and Nick Hearn (nick.hearn@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

Newly received History books: Paris Commune 1871, religion and state, French Resistance, Mitterand

This week is a French-inspired selection of new History books touching on some key episodes and themes in French history:

Robert, Jean-Louis ; Aprile, Sylvie ; Godineau, Laure ; Rey, Claudine ; Rougerie, Jacques, Le Paris de la Commune 1871 (Paris : Belin, 2015)

Barralis, Christine; Boudet, Jean-Patrice; Delivré, Fabrice; Genêt, Jean-Philippe, Église et État, Église ou État? : les clercs et la genèse de l’État moderne (Paris ; Roma : Publications de la Sorbonne : École française de Rome, 2014)

Petit, Vincent, God save la France : la religion et la nation (Paris : Éditions du Cerf, 2015)

Pinault, Michel, Maurice Barrès et la “grande pitié des laboratoires de France” : discours parlementaires pour une politique des recherches scientifiques en France (1919-1923) (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2015)

Wieviorka, Olivier, Todd, Jane Marie, The French Resistance (Cambridge : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016)

Bernard, Mathias, Les années Mitterrand : du changement socialiste au tournant libéral (Paris : Belin, 2015)

New History books 1 Sept 2016

There is more!

Many more new books were received. You can find them all here.

Personalise your alerts

If you would like a personalised RSS feed so you can be alerted to our new history books, just email isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk with your preferred period, country or topic.