Introduction

Paul Petau has been a passionate collector of manuscripts. Over the years, he assembled a library which was very renowned among contemporaries. The collection included manuscripts ranging from religion to classical literature and from the history of France to science and medicine. Paul’s son Alexander increased the collection to more than 1500 manuscripts, a great part of them of the highest value. Léopold Delisle, head of the manuscript department at the National Library in Paris (1874–1905), described Petau’s collection as “l’une des plus belles collections de manuscrits qui aient existés en France,” regretting that it had been sold (and consequently dispersed) by the same Alexander. It was Queen Christina of Sweden who acquired Petau’s manuscripts, which were brought to Rome and are now mainly in the Reginenses Latini fund of the Vatican Library, while a few of them were left in Stockholm, where they still are. Isaac Vossius, Queen Christina’s librarian, kept some of the manuscripts, now in the University Library in Leiden; others are now scattered in various libraries around Europe: the British Library in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, the Bibliothèque Universitaire de Genève, etc. The aim of this section is to reconstruct Paul Petau’s library and allow scholars to visit–as many learned men of the 17th century did–one of the most important private collections of manuscripts in Paris of the early 1600s.