Élie Bouhéreau (1643–1719) has long possessed a modest measure of historical renown as the first keeper of Dublin's Marsh's Library, to which he was appointed in 1701. A Huguenot, born in La Rochelle in 1643, he was “a stalwart member of the Protestant community” (18) in that city until, he confided to his diary, “the revocation of the Edict of Nantes at the end of 1685, and the various persecutions carried out against the Protestants in France” prompted him and those of his family who “could” (19) to take refuge in England, from where he moved to take up permanent residence in Dublin in 1703. Since he had, prior to his flight, contrived to transfer his books, which numbered more than two thousand (and which became one of the foundation collections of Marsh's Library), and also his correspondence and the extant archive of the Reformed Church of La Rochelle (whose history and content are addressed by Didier Poton [chapter 12]), Bouhéreau's relocation was not completed in haste. He had carefully assessed his options and determined that since he could no longer pursue medicine or the intellectual pursuits that, alongside his commitment to Protestantism, defined his life in France, he was left with no alternative.

Bouhéreau's contributions to the English diplomatic service, to which he devoted his energies between his arrival in England in 1686 and his assumption of permanent residence in Dublin in 1703, and his formative involvement in Marsh's Library have not been overlooked by those who have continued to contribute to the Huguenot historiography that Bouhéreau championed. Many have drawn on his surviving papers in this endeavor, but diverse aspects of his contribution to Reformed Protestantism, to advanced medical practice and to the promotion of intellectual inquiry in France during the first half of his life, and to the diversity of activities he pursued thereafter, have, when they have not been wholly neglected, been accorded insufficient attention. The fourteen authors who contribute to this collection do much to remedy this deficiency; though several build on, or rehearse, work they have published elsewhere, the collection is an appropriate companion to The Diary (1689-1719) and Accounts (1704-1717) of Élie Bouhéreau published in 2019 by the Irish Manuscripts Commission.

Given their role in its preparation, it is unsurprising that the four editors (Marie Loutré, Jane McKee, Jean-Paul Pettion, and Amy Prendergast) of his diary and accounts all feature in this collection. It is appropriate that the volume includes a short, helpful “biographical sketch” by Jean-Paul Pettion, who more than any other rescued Bouhéreau from the neglect that was his fate in the mid-twentieth century. The contributions of Jane McKee, who highlights Bouhéreau's engagement with the revision of key Huguenot devotional texts (chapter 6); Amy Prendergast, who interrogates Bouhéreau's diary for what it reveals of the participation of envoys’ wives in diplomatic endeavor (chapter 8); and Marie Loutré, who provides the most reliable account to date of Bouhéreau's role as financial agent, secretary, and protégé of the influential Huguenot soldier and politician, Henri de Massue, third Earl of Galway (chapter 10), point better to the diversity of Bouhéreau's involvements that the collection highlights.

These chapters may not all possess equal interest for readers of this journal. In some instances, the authors’ priority is to locate Bouhéreau in the intellectual, historiographical, and political worlds in which he lived prior to Le Refuge/The Great Exodus of 1685; these include Geoff Kemp's forensic exploration of Bouhéreau's interaction with John Locke (chapter 4); David van der Linden's rewarding assessment of the historiographical consequence of the miscellany of documents appertaining to “the persecution of the Huguenots … between 1656 and 1685” (63) assembled by Abraham Tessereau that survive in Bouhéreau's papers (chapter 5); Noreen Humble's forensic examination of Bouhéreau's “method of taking notes” (162); and Muriel Hoareau's account of the Huguenot world of La Rochelle before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (chapter 3). These authors are largely successful in their aims and in expanding understanding of the man, his environment, and the intellectual circles of which he was a part. By comparison, Eleanor Jones-McAuley's pioneering account of Huguenot worship music in eighteenth-century Dublin (chapter 7) may appeal to a more select audience, but it provides a valuable perspective on Huguenot worship and on the accommodations French Reformed Protestants made with the Church of Ireland. Ivar McGrath's analysis (chapter 9) of Bouhéreau's management of money, both his own and the considerable sums paid the French (Huguenot) military pensioners, might seem equally rarified, but McGrath utilizes his exceptional knowledge of the financial world of the early eighteenth century to provide a secure guide, not only to Bouhéreau's finances but also to that of the Huguenot community of which he remained an active part.

The volume concludes (chapter 13) with a comparably informative, and innovative engagement, using the theft of titles as its focus, with the administration of Marsh's library in the long eighteenth century. The picture it paints does not reflect well on the dutifulness of the keepers (librarians) that succeeded Bouhéreau, who died in 1719, or on the attentiveness of the governors to whom keepers answered. But it is emblematic of the merits of locating Élie Bouhéreau and the library to which he made such a formative contribution in a wider context than that of the Huguenot refuge in Ireland.