François Dupuigrenet Desroussilles

Summary

History of the Printed Book, Religious History of  Early Modern Europe, Christian philosophical anthropology, Visual Poetry

Biography

I studied Romance philology, paleography, codicology and the history of the book in Paris at the´École nationale des chartes (1972-1976) and was for a long time a librarian: curator of rare books at the Bibliothèque nationale (1976-1995), director of the École nationale supérieure des sciences de l´information et des bibliothèques (Lyon, 1995-2005), keeper of rare books at the Institut de France (2006-2007). During that period I taught the history of Italian culture at the university of Geneva (1978-1981), the history of conservation at the university of Bologne (2000-2004), the history of the book at the university of Lyon II (2001-2005), and the social history of communication at the University of Italian Switzerland (1998-2002). In 2007 I was hired by Florida State University (Tallahassee) in the interdisciplinary program History of Text Technologies (HOTT) and I am now  full professor of medieval and early modern Christianity in the Religion department at FSU. At the Institute of Italian Studies of the University of Italian Switzerland I teach the history of the Italian book and the history of culture in the master’s program LLCI. For the “Petite bibliotheque Rivages” I publish classical texts in Christian philosophical anthropology (Augustine, Petrarch, Bossuet, Pascal). I also translate and edit English and Italian literature (from Petrarch to Oscar Wilde and Carlo Emilio Gadda). 

Research

I work in three areas of study: the history of the book, early modern religious history, visual poetry (poesis picta). Trained in the erudite school of Henri-Jean Martin I published studies in material bibliography, about the history of paper among other things, but mostly about Bible publishing and European biblical culture, mostly the Port-Royal Bible, and I prepare a book about French and English Sovereigns and the Bible (16th-17t h c.). Fascinated by visual poetry that I discovered studying the visual space of the book I work on the “painted word” during the Baroque era. In that field I prepare the French edition of Giovanni Pozzi’s La parola dipinta and a book about the “poetical labyrinths” of Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz. For the   

Recent publications

In 2014 I published a commented edition of the Spiritual Exercices of Ignatius of Loyola in the 18th c. translation of Denis-Xavier Clement  (Paris, Rivages) and a commented translation of Tacet, Giovanni Pozzi’s last book about the mystical conception of (Paris, Rivages). In 2013 the publisher Bartillat  2013 started publishing revised editions of my translations of Elizabeth von Arnim, originally published by Salvy in the early 1990s, that introduced this author to the French public.

Media contact

In 2013 I was curator of an exhibition about the Italian Bible during the Renaissance and Reform (Caen, Musee des Beaux-Arts), and in 2014  of  A French Dream : Maps from Florida (17th-19th c. )at the Strozier Library of Florida State University (Tallahassee).