The author has collected here a number of her more recent articles and those of other authors on surviving library catalogues of the religious orders of eighteenth-century France. The volume concentrates on three such types of library catalogue: firstly, catalogues from the ancien régime belonging to religious houses mostly in the south of France; secondly, the revolutionary inventories; and, finally, ‘ideal’ libraries constructed mainly from reviews in popular academic journals.

Technological advances in data retention have vastly aided study of such catalogues. This has been more noticeable in France than anywhere else, thanks to the availability of the early inventories of the religious houses compiled during the French Revolution before the dispersal of these religious libraries into literary depots in 1791 and to the easy access to those completed before the sale or transfer of such collections to the new public libraries in 1792.

A number of these inventories, varying according to locality, are studied here, with the proviso that in the first phase of compilation (1789–90) religious books were often excluded from the more detailed inventories as being of little value to an enlightened age and were regarded as having no use in the projected national public libraries. Thus, the small and old-fashioned library of the Visitation nuns of Caen, which held works mostly on spirituality, was afforded scant treatment by the revolutionary commissioners. Some of these were, however, scrupulous and were prepared to incorporate entire library catalogues from the ancien régime into their inventories. The disappearance of any original catalogue resulted in the loss of valuable information about a library classification scheme which often reflected the house's uniqueness. Furthermore, the later revolutionary inventories compiled after 1791, when books were finally moved from their original shelves into the depots, were usually arranged alphabetically, so original classification schemes were destroyed. Original catalogues which have survived indicate the ‘tonality’ of a particular community. Those examined here show collections which were backward-looking, reflecting the Counter-Reformation and the seventeenth century, and were detached from the eighteenth-century struggles with irreligion. From the evidence of their catalogue, only the Dominicans of Toulon seemed to show much interest in eighteenth-century affairs. The catalogue of the Oratorians in Marseilles (6,421 titles) was compiled in 1746, in the context of their dispute with the local bishop over Jansenism. It discarded the five traditional classification categories promoted by the Maurists which began with ‘Scripture’. The Oratorian's catalogue was ‘encyclopedic’, in that it placed reference books in the first category and gave Jansenist authors a favoured position. Its compilation represented a transitional stage: as the numbers of theological works declined in this library, so profane works increased and were allotted a place towards the front of the catalogue.

By contrast, the 1777 library catalogue of the Maurists of Orleans reveals a Benedictine community characteristically more at home in the seventeenth century and attracted to historical research. The addition of Jansenist works, however, in the monks’ catalogue up until the early eighteenth century should not be overlooked. A clearer commitment to Jansenism is reflected in Bishop Colbert of Montpellier's posthumous 1740 catalogue, also examined here. In this, entries of pro-Jansenist books created ‘une bibliothèque de combat’ which is dominated by scriptural commentaries and the deliberate avoidance of casuistry and Jesuit moral theology. The 1776 catalogue of the Minims of Marseilles traces the intellectual journey of the order in France. In the seventeenth century the order was engaged in apologetic battles with heretics. In the eighteenth century, the Minims compiled a library catalogue which represented close fidelity to the encyclopedic spirit of the times through attempting to demonstrate that their library reflected the totality of knowledge. Even by 1776 the compilers of the Minims’ catalogue did not see spirituality and science as incompatible. Generally, however, theological accessions declined in the eighteenth century whilst those of the sciences and arts rose. The Christian defence against the irreligious Enlightenment can be detected from the mid-eighteenth century by the presence of works of contemporary Christian apologists who attempted to refute the philosophes.

The concluding chapters on ‘ideal libraries’ ingeniously scan reviews and articles in two distinguished French religious periodicals of the eighteenth century and suggest that their contents represent a virtual library subject to similar developments and interests to those found in any library of a religious order. Reviews in the Mémoires des Trévoux (1701–62), a Jesuit publication, gradually became highly critical of Enlightenment literature, although reviews from the 1740s showed the Jesuits beginning to prefer Newtonian physics to their traditional Cartesianism. The Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques, by contrast an anti-Jesuit organ, gives proof of Jansenism surviving and developing as a political force in the last decades of the eighteenth century when Jansenist sympathisers allied with the parlements against ecclesiastical authority. Thus this periodical approved of reviews attacking episcopal pastorals supposedly impregnated with rationalism. The Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques survived the French Revolution, commissioning reviews which argued for the need of new orientations in the current controversies over Church and State.