The Huguenot refugee Élie Bouhéreau (1643–1719), a medical doctor from La Rochelle who became the first librarian of Archbishop Marsh’s Library in Dublin, donated his personal library of some 2,000 volumes and papers, including 1,250 letters addressed to him and two volumes compiled by his great friend Abraham Tessereau (died 1689), ‘to serve as a general history of the persecution … from 1656 until the Revocation’ (ML, Ms Z2.2.9 & 10).

This volume brings together some of the contributions presented at a symposium held at Marsh’s Library in 2019 entitled ‘Élie Bouhéreau and the world of the Huguenots’ that examined aspects of his collection of books and manuscripts (11). Two historical sketches set the scene, one biographical (Jean-Paul Pittion), the other a thumbnail by Muriel Hoareau of La Rochelle, at that time a ‘polyglot and cosmopolitan port’ (32). Geoff Kemp presents an erudite study of a meeting in La Rochelle in September 1678 between the philosopher John Locke and Bouhéreau for a medical consultation (51). The master apothecary, Moïse Charas, was among their mutual acquaintances. The twelve letters from him to Bouhéreau (ML, Ms Z2.2.17(7)/1–12) reveal their shared interest in the development of cinchona, yet make no mention of the Englishman. David Van der Linden considers the ‘general history of persecution’, which Tessereau never wrote, but for which he collected damning printed documents and two hundred eyewitness accounts of the Dragonnades (1681) later put to good use by Élie Benoist for his monumental Histoire de l’Édit de Nantes (1693–5) (79). Two chapters focus on the Psalms. Jane McKee places the nineteen letters by Laurent Drelincourt (1625–80), sent between 6 August 1674 and 14 January 1679 (ML, Ms Z2.2.14(13)/1–19), in the context of the revision of the archaic language of the Genevan Psalter (1539), a project launched by Valentin Conrart (1603–75) in which Bouhéreau was involved. Eleanor Jones-McCauley reflects on the musical culture associated with psalm-singing by Huguenot refugees in eighteenth-century Dublin and identifies from published psalters and hymnals the tunes from the Genevan Psalter that remained popular in the Irish Huguenot Refuge (106). From a handful of entries in Bouhéreau’s Diary, Amy Prendergast ably reconstructs the role played by elite women in diplomatic sociability by focussing on Mary Coxe, wife of Thomas Coxe, envoy extraordinary of William III to the Swiss cantons from August 1689 to September 1692, whom Bouhéreau accompanied as his personal secretary. Charles Ivar McGrath and Marie Léoutre examine Bouhéreau’s financial activity between 1689 and 1717, highlighting, on the one hand, his role as an international financial manager for a number of his fellow refugees, on the other, his activity as Lord Galway’s protégé, secretary and financial agent in the settlement of French Protestants in Ireland. Noreen Humble reconstructs Bouhéreau’s scholarly activity from his lost notebooks: she examined every book in his extant library and found 151 volumes (roughly 8.7 per cent of the total) that had cross-references to the notebooks on the flyleaves. While the content of the notes is lost, the cross-references point to a shift in his interests from classical Greek and Latin literature to religious controversy in the decade preceding the Revocation, when French Protestants were subjected to escalating oppression. Didier Poton summarises the contents of the archives of the Reformed Church of La Rochelle, which Bouhéreau brought into exile, thereby saving these ‘heretical’ records from official destruction after 1685. They were eventually returned to La Rochelle in 1862. Jason McElligott outlines the circumstances that enabled perhaps as much as 10 per cent of Bouhéreau’s library to go missing between 1707 and 1840 from a combination of theft (ninety-eight titles stolen) and benign neglect, a sorry tale later compounded by a sale of so-called ‘duplicates’ in 1833 and accidental destruction in 1916. The pattern of the thefts points to an emerging second-hand market in Dublin for rare books, as after 1767 it was the oldest and rarest editions of classical authors that disappeared off the shelves.

The volume would have benefited from stronger editorial intervention. Mistakes of fact or attribution have not been corrected; nor have the mistranslations occurring in the chapters which were originally in French. These deficiencies aside, the essays are for the most part original, engaging and well-written; they offer new information, new insight and haunting glimpses into Élie Bouhéreau’s books, papers and communities of origin and exile.