Élie Bouhéreau The Collections and Communities of a Huguenot Refugee reviewed by Peter Fox
Published in The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 2026.
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Abstract

, Élie Bouhéreau, the first librarian of Marsh’s Library in Dublin had, as the editors of this volume point out, ‘the misfortune to live in interesting times’. As a Huguenot in La Rochelle his life grew increasing arduous as Louis XIV imposed growing restrictions on the rights of Protestants. In 1685, following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Bouhéreau sent his books and papers to England, together with the archives of the Reformed Church of La Rochelle, and, a few months later, he followed them, along with most of his family. There followed a decade of travelling, during which he served in various roles and at the end of which he was offered the post of librarian of the new library which Narcissus Marsh, archbishop of Dublin, was in the process of establishing., Bouhéreau’s biography has been documented in a number of publications, but this volume places his life against the background of Huguenot history and examines his books and papers in more detail than hitherto. It is the result of a conference held at Marsh’s Library in November 2019., The book is divided into four parts. In the first section, Jean-Paul Pittion provides a biography of Bouhéreau, and Muriel Hoareau discusses his background as a Protestant in seventeenth-century La Rochelle. The second part, ‘Community Creations’, examines his network of contacts, including his encounters with John Locke and with the lawyer Abraham Tessereau who assembled ‘two sprawling [End Page 127] volumes’ filled with notes and printed publications documenting the persecution of the Huguenots. The chapter by David van der Linden is a detailed examination of these volumes, which have been largely neglected by historians and which, thanks to the friendship of Tessereau and Bouhéreau, are now among the collections at Marsh’s. Aspects of Huguenot religious life are the subject of two chapters, one by Jane McKee on psalms and sonnets, which form the subject of correspondence between Bohéreau and the clergyman Laurent Drelincourt, and the second, by Eleanor Jones-McAuley, on Huguenot worship music in eighteenth-century Dublin., The first chapter of the third section, by Amy Prendergast, uses Bouhéreau’s diary to provide an insight into diplomatic life in the late seventeenth century as seen through the eyes of the writer, who served as secretary to Thomas Coxe, William III’s envoy to the Swiss cantons. The significant role played by women in the development of diplomatic networks is especially revealing. Bouhéreau’s diary and account book are used by Charles Ivar McGrath to consider the day-to-day management of money in Ireland at the time, including the frustrations of an unstable exchange rate between sterling and the Irish pound. In the final chapter in this section, Marie Léoutre also considers eighteenth-century accountancy and financial transactions, using as evidence the relationship between Bouhéreau and another Huguenot, Henri de Massue de Ruvigny, later earl of Galway, and whom Bouhéreau served as secretary from 1693., The final section will probably be of most interest to readers of The Library. Entitled ‘Loss, Return, and Reconstruction’, it considers what has been ‘lost, dispersed, or repatriated’ from Bouhéreau’s papers and books. Bouhéreau left a notebook containing over 200 pages of notes, diary entries, and accounts, which Noreen Humble examines in detail. It is clear that the surviving notebook is just the third of three, the first two of which seem to have contained notes on his reading, as Humble has been able to glean from the cross-references still extant in Bouhéreau’s books, now in Marsh’s. His library contained around 2,000 titles in 1,700 volumes, of which around a third were on religious subjects, one fifth belles-lettres, one sixth history, and the remainder medicine, philosophy, science, and law. John Locke’s method of recording and retrieving information, his ‘nouvelle méthode’, is well known, and although Bouhéreau and Locke were acquainted, the Englishman’s approach was quite different from that of his French contemporary, described in detail in this chapter., Bouhéreau had always intended that the La Rochelle church archives, which he brought...