Catriona Seth (Université d’Oxford) « Combler les silences de l’histoire grâce aux correspondances : de Marie-Antoinette aux enfants trouvés »

Editing 18th-century correspondences: intellectual and editorial histories

As a major source for the history of ideas, epistolary corpuses reveal social and private sociability, literary, and artistic exchanges, which permit readers to enter in the lives of writers and into political history. This seminar proposes an exploration of the epistemological and scientific issues related to the editing of intellectual correspondences of the Enlightenment, in the 18th century and at the turn of the 19th century, which have either been completed or in progress. We reflect on new editorial methods and on how newly edited corpora are published in light of digital humanities, while taking into account epistolary practices and the material specificity of Enlightenment manuscripts. From these methodological and technical premises, we approach the new fields of knowledge that the study of correspondences allows us to explore, notably with respect to the history of the book and to the networks of transmission from the Neo-Classical Age to the Enlightenment.