Unpacking a Provençal Library

The recent acquisition of the library of the Aubanel family, whose best-known member was the poet, Théodore Aubanel, allows a study of the Félibrige movement, its friends, and its critics, through an analysis of the manuscript inscriptions. Of the library's 1,300 books and ten boxes of pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers, and academic bulletins, there are some six hundred inscriptions and manuscript insertions written in French, Provençal, Catalan, Italian, English, and Esperanto. Ranging form brief definitions to sonnets, from praise to provocation, they shed an unaccustomed light on the writers, presses, and preoccupations of nineteenth-century Provence.