Charity Schools and Book Trade in the 18th Century: the Books for the Use of the Ursuline Students

The Knowledge Market
By Emmanuelle Chapron
English

From the case of the Ursulines, the main female teaching order of Old Regime France, we aim to clarify the relationships between the charitable schools and the book economy in the 18th Century. How did the communities supply their classes with homogeneous and inexpensive material? Conversely, by which means – from the regimes of privilege to the commercial processes – did the booksellers try to secure their positions on this market? From the Paris and Champagne cross grounds, the study widens then at the level of the kingdom by focusing on a particular editorial type, that of works published “for use of the pupils of the Ursulines”. We aim thus to consider the processes of construction of the schoolbooks markets, between local institutional demand and changes in the editorial geography in the last decades of the 18th Century.

Keywords

  • France
  • 18th Century
  • book history
  • Ursulines
  • charity schools
  • textbooks
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