Introduction

Paper Heritage explores how people in Italy, France, and Spain collected and preserved various types of papers, including books, letters, drawings, engravings, and sheet music, from the late 16th to the 19th centuries. The contributors’ central focus is the relationship between social actors and their paper patrimonies. The collectors include Men of Letters, diplomats, physicians, polygraphs, theologians, university professors, mathematicians, legal scholars, clerics, entrepreneurs, nuns, philanthropists, female writers, and poets. By studying this wide range of individuals, with their unique cultural, social, and gender identities, we gain insight into the accumulation, valorisation, and transmission of their paper patrimonies. This book departs from most other studies on collecting by shifting the focus from collections and preserving institutions to the collectors themselves, their aspirations for their accumulated papers and considering the gender of the collectors. Covering three centuries, the contributions provide a comprehensive look at both the collectors’ aspirations and the post-transmission fate of these papers, shedding light on the scope of the collections and the various publics to whom the mise en scène of the papers was directed.