Dupuy (Fonds)
Item
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Country
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FR
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Name of institution (English)
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National Library of France (Richelieu)
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Language of name of institution
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fra
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Contact information: postal address
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Bibliothèque Richelieu, 58, rue de Richelieu, 75002 Paris
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Contact information: phone number
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0033 (0)153795959
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Contact information: email
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manuscrits@bnf.fr (manuscript department)
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Reference number
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Dupuy
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Type of reference number
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Archival reference number
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Title (English)
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Dupuy collection
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Title (official language of the state)
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Dupuy (Fonds)
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Language of title
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fra
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Creator / accumulator
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Jacques Dupuy (1591-1656)
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Pierre Dupuy (1582-1651)
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Date note
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16th century/17th century
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Language(s)
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fra
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ita
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Extent
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958 storage units
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Type of material
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Textual Material
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Scope and content
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The Dupuy collection comprises printed books and manuscripts that were initially collected by Pierre Dupuy (1582-1652) in his travels and that were presented to the King of France in 1657. The themes are broad, but they mostly relate to French history.
This collection includes a volume entitled "Voiages [en Orient] et relations" (Dupuy 238) comprising various French and Italian travel narratives from the 16th and 17th centuries, including an Italian account of the death of Sultan Mourad, the accession of Sultan Mehemet and his departure from Constantinople for the Hungarian War, dedicated by Salomon Usque to François Savary de Bréves, French ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, in 1596 (fol. 90).
An epistolary volume (Dupuy 264) includes a letter from Duarte de Paz, a Portuguese converso, to the Bishop of Paris, written in Rome on June 15, 1536, asking him to send a letter to the king of France with a petition to favour the New Christian cause (fols. 13-15v). This letter was published by Matos (1952, pp. 208-13).
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Archival history
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Sons of the humanist Claude Dupuy (1545-94), Pierre Dupuy (1582-1651) and his brother Jacques (1591-1656) assumed the legacy of a humanist and scholarly tradition that they continued by making their Parisian study one of the centres of the Republic of Letters in the first half of the 17th century, and their library one of the most famous and numerous collections of books in the Europe of their time. Their library was encyclopaedic in the sense of the humanist tradition: embracing all the arts and sciences, but within the limits of a scholarly vision that excluded from its scope literary fiction in the vernacular. It thus pursued a model of library familiar to the great families of Robe at the end of the 16th century and exemplified by the very important library of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553-1617), to whose enrichment Claude and then Pierre Dupuy contributed as advisors. When Jacques-Auguste de Thou died, Pierre and Jacques Dupuy were entrusted with the posthumous management of his library and moved into the Hôtel de Thou on rue des Poitevins. They did not leave the Hôtel de Thou until 1645, when they joined the Bibliothèque du Roi (King's Library), which was housed in the Cordeliers convent, as guardians (Pierre held the title of "garde de la Bibliothèque du Roi", which was later inherited by Jacques).
The Dupuy brothers developed their own library in parallel with the management of the De Thou library and then the Bibliothèque du Roi. The initial core was formed by their father's library, a remarkable connoisseur of rare books and precious manuscripts: at the time of his death, it contained 136 medieval manuscripts and almost 2,000 printed books. Pierre and Jacques Dupuy continued to increase the number of these volumes through a relentless quest and by mobilising the vast network of their correspondents throughout Europe, to which were added the libraries of their two brothers who had died before them, Christophe and Augustin. By the time of Jacques' death in November 1656, the collection comprised more than 9,000 printed books and a large number of manuscripts, divided into two groups: more than 300 manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the 16th century and over 800 collections of memoirs, containing both original documents and copies.
In 1652, having become the sole heir to the library following the death of Pierre the previous year, Jacques Dupuy decided to endow the library to the King to prevent its dispersal. Only the collections of memoirs, which were bequeathed to Jacques-Auguste II de Thou, the last of Jacques-Auguste de Thou's sons, were exempt from this testamentary provision. The Dupuy brothers' library joined the Bibliothèque du Roi in 1657. It was not until the 18th century that the collections of memoirs followed the same path, albeit by a complex process. The collection of Jacques-Auguste II de Thou was first sold in 1680 to President Charron de Ménars, and then, in 1720, his heirs sold the collection to Procureur Joly de Fleury. In turn, Fleury sold the collection to the Bibliothèque du Roi in 1754. These volumes form the current Dupuy Collection.
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(source: BnF Comité d'histoire)
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Administrative / Biographical history
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Pierre Dupuy (1582-1651) was born in Paris. He became a historian and librarian during the reign of Louis XIV(1638-1715). He was the first to catalogue the royal archives (Trésor des chartes) and the King’s Library, with his brother Jacques Dupuy (1591-1656).
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(source: Encyclopaedia Britannica)
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Author of the description
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Kevin Soares, 2022
