Ben Bernard

Koren Jr. Prize — SFHS

www.societyforfrenchhistoricalstudies.net/the-william-...

Some cool news: my last article was recognized with the Honorable Mention distinction for the Koren Prize, just awarded by the Society for French Historical Studies for the “most outstanding article on any period of French history” in the previous calendar year by a scholar based in the USA/Canada:

A Provincial Market in Second-Hand Books: Book Sales in Devon, 1688–1725 Abstract. Comparatively little is known about England’s early book-auction trade outside of London and the university towns, with few catalogues surviving

*small embarrassed voice*
A little plug for my article on Devon book sales c. 1700, which has gone online open access. tl;dr book auctions weren't just a London/Oxbridge thing: a flourishing second-hand book market centred on Exeter included auctions from the 1680s.
doi.org/10.1093/libr...

Yale has announced our upcoming visiting speaker series as well as my spring seminar on the history of institutional legitimacy in higher education: news.yale.edu/2025/10/06/c...

Yale has announced our upcoming visiting speaker series as well as my spring seminar on the history of institutional legitimacy in higher education: news.yale.edu/2025/10/06/c...

Thank you!!

Thanks for sharing those screenshots — a classic volume, and what a cool passage there. Sounds like a dream course to teach!!

Awesome!! Thanks, Liesbeth!

Terrific! I hope it might be useful.

Thank you! 🙏

I'd be interested in the reference/citation too!

Thank you Julie!! It was really helpful to think with your Lyon book for this one on the relationship between state actors, bureaucracy, & everyday practices of sexuality...

9️⃣ Thanks to the journal editors and Duke UP, the article is free to read on an exceptional basis through Dec 31, 2025: read.dukeupress.edu/french-histo... 🎁📅

8️⃣ (p.s. I’m on the job market this year as my postdoc at Yale ends this spring—open to new opportunities! 🙏📬)

7️⃣ What became of Théru's school? The Collège Mazarin once shaped French morals through education. Today, the same building houses the Académie française, which does so through language. (Continuity vs. change...)

6️⃣ FWIW, I think we see the social history of sexuality differently when attending to elite institutions. When Foucault wrote, “The sex of the schoolboy became... a public problem” over the 18th century, there are strong reasons to think he had such stories—and this particular school—in mind.

5️⃣ Above all, I show how Théru's twin endeavors fit together: that vice policing fit the school's moral charter. Such police work was an indirect consequence of absolutist wars of conquest, state building, and a particular intellectual understanding of the nature of gender and sexual difference.

4️⃣ In the article, I read those police archives alongside:
✍️ drafts & reports from Sorbonne & Parlement overseers
📒 account books
📕 printed textbooks
🏛️ architectural plans
…in French & Latin, to reconstruct neighborhood life in the growing city.

3️⃣ It's a strange side hustle for a humanist, no? Because of his police work, I’ve uncovered more correspondence from Théru than pretty much any of his colleagues. 📂 These letters—in police archives, not university ones—offer a rare glimpse into how higher education operated under absolutism.

2️⃣ Our man Théru dutifully taught Latin & Christian morality to his teenage students. But he also... maintained a vast clandestine urban information network and worked covertly with vice police to track, arrest, imprison, or banish alleged “sodomites” across Paris—for nearly 50 years. 🌈🕵️‍♂️⚖️

1️⃣ The article traces the strange career of Nicolas Théru, a professor (or regent) at the Collège Mazarin, a school which opened in 1688 to instill French mores in elite youth from provinces newly annexed by Louis XIV's wars of conquest. 🇫🇷📚

🚨 New article! I'm excited to share “The sodomy consultant of Paris, 1688–1737,” published this week in French Historical Studies: read.dukeupress.edu/french-histo... . A 🧵:

La Sorbonne entre en guerre de religion: autorité universitaire, censure et pouvoir royal en France (v. 1551–v. 1589) ‘It is the Sorbonne on which the entire school of theology depends, where the most prominent members of the faculty are sourced, where all cases concerning

Enjoyed reviewing this interesting and important book on the Wars of Religion by Thierry Amalou, *La Sorbonne entre en guerre de religion: autorité universitaire, censure et pouvoir royal en France (v. 1551–v. 1589)* academic.oup.com/fh/article-a...

Academic gossip!

FYI, here's what I ultimately came up with: samuelrutherford.com/wp-content/u... Thanks to everyone who shared their own resources!

Inszenierte Keuschheit This study investigates sexual offenses that were committed in the early modern Jesuit order against school pupils, students, confessants, and other Jesuits. It reveals patterns of sexual violence tha...

Buchtipp: Ulrich L. Lehner, »Inszenierte Keuschheit. Sexualdelikte in der Gesellschaft Jesu im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert« (Open Access)

Thanks for sharing! I hope it can be useful to book historians & librarians.

Illuminated bordered Gutenberg Bible leaf on parchment from the BnF

Incunable-Stravaganza?!

In case, (like me), you missed both the early printing shows
at the #BnF (2023) and Princeton Libraries (2018), here's a handy dual(ish) review...

europenowjournal.org/2023/11/20/i...

Thanks! I didn't know there were hashtags here!