As a graduate student, when I first began to conduct original research in the French archives, I was daunted both by the challenges of reading eighteenth-century French handwriting and by the sheer mass of surviving documentation. Yet over time, as my skills improved, I came to enjoy the endless puzzles of deciphering manuscripts and following the clues that would lead me from document to document.
In recent years, I have become involved in an international team project to analyze and digitize the business records of France’s most famous theater. Founded in 1680 by King Louis XIV, the Comédie Française kept extensive accounts that record the details of every performance down to 1793, including the plays presented each day, the actors who performed in them, and the number of tickets sold in each price category, as well as the minutes of the troupe’s weekly business meetings.
The Comédie Française Registers Project, now in its sixteenth year, brings together experts on business history, literature, and the theater with IT specialists as we transform these manuscript records into online research tools.
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