Early French Research Articles

Montaigne’s Vagabond Styles: Political Homelessness in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract This article analyses political homelessness in French literature during the Wars of Religion (1562–1598), using Montaigne’s ‘De la vanité’ (‘Of Vanity’) as a case study. In that chapter, in which Montaigne discusses travel extensively, he aligns writers and vagabonds, later describing his writing style and way of thinking as vagabondage. There is no direct equivalent of the term ‘homelessness’ in early modern French, but ‘vagabond’ is frequently used to describe those of no fixed abode. Montaigne’s brief appropriations of the vagabond figure enable a reassessment of his relation to home and to politics, understood in the broader context of mass displacement and renewed philosophical reflection on home in this period. Firstly, the alignment between writers and vagabonds is read as a reference to Montaigne’s experience of papal censorship in Rome and an anticipation of his claim to be a citizen of the world. Montaigne’s creative vagabondage has affinities with Rosi Braidotti’s theory of ‘nomadic subjectivity’ (another kind of world-citizenship), which is both an aesthetic principle and a way of interrogating – and affirming – political agency. The article then goes on to analyse the extent to which Montaigne is ‘politically homeless’, in the sense that he is alienated by politics and refuses factionalism. Lastly, we consider Montaigne’s relation to homelessness in the context of contemporary print culture: the existence of clandestine ‘homeless texts’ reveals the limits of Montaigne’s strategic vagabondage. The conclusion then returns to the stakes of Montaigne’s claim that his style of writing is a ‘vagabond’ movement.

Revolutionary electricity in 1790: shock, consensus, and the birth of a political metaphor.

The 1790 Fête de la fédération in the early French Revolution evoked the memory of the taking of the Bastille while tamping down on the simmering social forces that had erupted on 14 July 1789. How to do both? As an official architect put it, through the festival, 'the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all by a kind of electrification, against which even the most perverse men cannot defend themselves'. This paper argues that a new language of revolutionary electricity came into being with the French Revolution. It argues that revolutionaries drew upon concepts of medical electricity developed in the 1780s to analogize the literal electricity of the ether to the revolutionary electricity of collective political sentiment. Though historians have associated electricity with radical politics, this paper argues that in the hands of bureaucrats and festival planners, electricity entered revolutionary discourse as a powerful mechanism for exercising authority and control over an unruly revolutionary public.

In Search of Lost Fort in Puducherry

The fort and the fortified walled town that had never been seen before on the Indian East coast was in Puducherry during the early phase of French rule. Francois Martin had planned the town Pondichery and strengthened its defences. He constructed a great star-shaped fort called Fort St. Louis named after Louis XIV, after the plan of Vauban for the Tournai fort, was viewed as far stronger and all the way more secure and hoped that no one can destroy it. On August 25, 1706, the fort was inaugurated and then in 1745, the whole town was encircled with a fortified wall and moat. Between 1761 and 1770 the whole French town, fort and the fortified walls were razed down by the British army. Now the remains of the unconquered fort and town walls are not found anywhere in modern Puducherry. Jean Deloche made a major study to trace the early French Puducherry using records and maps. In January 2018, a team of History students from Tagore Government Arts and Science College under the direction of the author unearthed a part of the architecture of the lost fort in the heart of modern Puducherry town. This paper brings out a comprehensive summary of the archaeological fieldwork in search of French fort and fortified wall which encircled early Puducherry.

How to pronounce silent letters in English and French

According to the Law on Education, the National Training Program, new educational institutions have been built, and the existing ones have been reconstructed and repaired in accordance with modern standards. In the framework of the Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan "On Education" and the National Program of Personnel Training, a comprehensive system of teaching foreign languages, is the formation of a harmoniously developed, educated, modern-minded young generation , a system aimed at further integration of the republic into the world community has been created.
 Silent letter is part of a word that written but not spoken. Silent letter can sometimes join with other letters to form part of a word. Silent letters exist in many English words and French words as well. Because of this, they often cause confusion and sometimes embarrassment when they are accidentally spoken.One of the reasons why silent letters are used in English, French and some other languages relates to following. During the formation evolution of English and French many foreign words were assimilated or absorbed in the language in Latin ,Germanic , Greek words were readily added to early English and French as was the spelling. All natural languages change and because they change, they have histories. Every language changes in different ways, so their histories are unique and different. The history of a given language is the description of how it has changed over time.

Ethics, Economics, and the Specter of Naturalism: The Enduring Relevance of the Harmony Doctrine School of Economics

This article revisits the "harmony doctrine" school of economics (1835–1860) and its distinctive understanding of how ethics and economics intersect. Harmony doctrine thinkers staked out a “natural” understanding of economic phenomena that in many ways fused the classical political economy of Adam Smith with the earlier French Physiocratic School. Their metaphysically grounded interpretation was largely eclipsed by the developments of utilitarian and marginalist schools by the end of the nineteenth century. Yet harmony doctrine thinking adhered to a distinct understanding of how ethical processes and outcomes play out within the economic sphere that has to date gone under examined by business ethicists. This paper outlines three characteristics of harmony doctrine views: the belief in curative forces empowered to "heal" the economic order, a dichotomous interpretation of the economic realm that distinguishes the “natural” from the “artificial,” and an overarching belief in a harmonious social order actualized by cooperative interdependencies within economic enterprises. Despite falling into obscurity in the economic discipline, all these ideas found new life in intellectual currents of organizational and political thought at the turn of the twentieth century. After surveying these historical developments, this article concludes by demonstrating how harmony doctrine thinking helpfully illuminates persisting metaphysical dimensions of contemporary business ethics.

MS Paris, Bibliothèque des Missions étrangères 1069: The French-Arabic Dictionary of François Pétis de la Croix (1653-1713)?

This paper analyses an anonymous French-Arabic dictionary preserved in Paris, Bibliothèque des Missions étrangères. I argue that it seems to be a copy of a dictionary compiled by the early modern French Orientalist and diplomat François Pétis de la Croix, the younger. Beyond the question of authorship, I survey the themes and structure of the dictionary and discuss the compiler’s cultural insights into Ottoman and Safavid societies and the cultural barriers that his translations reveal.

Characteristics of Clinical Trials Launched Early in the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US and in France.

Based on hierarchical classification and logistic regression of early US and French COVID-19 clinical trials we show that despite the registration of a large number of trials, only a minority had characteristics usually associated with providing robust and relevant evidence.

Black Melancholy in the Early French Atlantic

Black Melancholy in the Early French Atlantic Ashley M. Williard THE ARCHIVE OF SLAVERY is an archive of disability. What would it mean to place this assertion front and center in disability studies, to consider early modern slavery as foundational to modern ideas and experiences of disability? Enslavers built a world of profit through the debilitation of enslaved Africans. Enslavers crafted a worldview through the rhetoric of disabled Black subjecthood. They upheld bondage by theorizing Africans as unfit and inferior, vulnerable and expendable. Such strategic deployment of debility for profit remains tragically pertinent. But what hidden worlds existed beyond imperial supremacy? Despite gaping silences, enslaved disability perspectives haunt the margins of colonial texts. Understudied French sources, particularly early narrative accounts, contain crucial insights into disability voices of the past. For every racialized pathology Europeans theorized, countless enslaved persons navigated a world built by but not for them. Their insistent presence and the traces of their pain, however subtle, illuminate little understood facets of disability history. At times, enslaved push-back refutes racist debility; at other times, it unearths experiences of disability within bondage. Scholars of slavery have long theorized the reasons for the archive's absences and have provided crucial models for the study of disability history given these lacunae. In her meditation on the sounds of enslaved women's pain under torture, Marisa Fuentes asks, "What does it mean to listen to this moment of anguish and suffering as an act of historical defiance? Is there something in the despair of their screams that conjures a powerful subjectivity that permeates the fortress of the archive?" Representations of mental distress create openings in the nearly impenetrable silence of colonial records. As I approach these apertures in slavery's fragmented archive of disability, I adapt Saidiya Hartman's method of "critical fabulation," a narrative reframing of enslaved people's stories that allows opacity and exposes layers of historical violence. As Hershini Bhana Young contends, archival absences may render enslaved will illegible, but "imaginative engagement with [that] illegibility" remains urgently possible, particularly in spaces of interruption and silence.1 As a case study, this article centers on enslaved melancholy and suicide in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French Caribbean with connections to the wider Atlantic world. Although pathologized by Europeans as "mélancolie noire," enslaved despair and self-destruction represent privileged sites [End Page 87] for reading mental disability as disruption of colonial discourse. In the first section, I present several religious, medical, and economic interpretations that contributed to conceptions of racialized difference that upheld colonial power. However, discussions of "black melancholy" not only deployed and produced racist tropes, but also reveal some enslaved people's responses to bondage. What colonials interpret as madness at times gives way to diverse and shifting understandings of kinship, faith, and the afterlife, and thus as alternatives to imperial hierarchies. However, mental disability represents not only trans-gressive defiance of socially constructed normativity, but also an embodied standpoint. The second section of this essay centers on moments in which despair and suicide resisted racial violence. As a counterpoint to degrading pathologies, mental distress brings new dimensions of enslaved life into focus, which can provide nuance to current understandings of disability and ongoing pursuits of disability justice. Not always positive or utopian, such alternative pathways and humanizing affects can make significant contributions to disability's worldmaking. Colonial discourses Ableism and racism have long been entangled, as disability historians Jenifer Barclay, Dea Boster, and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy demonstrate in studies of Anglo-Atlantic slavery.2 While debilitating violence was systematically committed against enslaved people, concepts of disability provided metaphorical rationalizations for racial hierarchies. Mental disabilities represent an especially crucial realm for comprehending race and bondage. Far from isolated psychological or cognitive phenomena, early modern conceptions of madness ranged from demonic possession to humoral imbalance, integrating links to the bodily, spiritual, and social realms.3 Above and beyond pathological interpretations, historians Richard Bell, Sowande' Mustakeem, and Terri Snyder demonstrate the complex and contradictory meanings of captive and enslaved suicide in the anglophone world.4 At the same time, Caribbean literature continues to examine the traumatic effects of colonial legacies, echoing Frantz Fanon's foundational work on the psychological implications...

Projects of Colonization of Algeria During the Early French Occupation (1830–1834)

After the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 and with the further conquest of North African lands, the share of the European population in the conquered territories was constantly increasing. At the same time, at the early stage of the French occupation of Algeria in 1830-1834, the fate of the lands seized by the French was not resolved, and there were different solutions to the “Algerian question”. This period has not received sufficient coverage in historiography. This article examines plans for the colonization and further development of Algeria on the materials of the Archives nationales d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence (A.N.O.M. F 80/1161), containing many projects dedicated to the colonization of the country, which were sent by French citizens for consideration in the Chamber of Deputies in the period 1830–1834. An auxiliary source used in the article is the published transcripts of the debates in the French Parliament. The projects of colonization were various and mostly utopian, and the authors themselves did not have clear understanding of the natural, ethno-confessional, and social realities of the country in which they proposed to establish a colony. The analysis of the archival materials revealed a wide cross-section of opinions on the structure of the future colony in Algeria and demonstrated the aspirations of the French of that time to regain the prestige of France in the international arena, to get a rich colony, and to evict the “inconvenient” population, i.e. prisoners, the poor, the unemployed, and emigrants to Algeria.

Syllable structure and prosodic words in Early Old French

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the phonotactics of syllable rhymes based on all unique tokens in two Early Old French texts. Based on the data from this single, conservative variety, I develop Jacobs’ (1994) proposal that the Old French stress rule is underlyingly trochaic and that word-fiinal stress is caused by the presence of an empty-headed final syllable. I argue that this analysis can only be valid while words with final stress systematically end in a consonant that can, and often must, be parsed as the onset to an empty-headed syllable. Although this is not the case in most later varieties of Old French, the prediction is borne out by our data. I conclude by examining the implications of this analysis for the accentuation and phonotactics of monosyllables and for the study of prosodic change in Old French.

Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women’s Press, 1758–1848. By Siobhán McIlvanney

<i>Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women’s Press, 1758–1848</i>. By <scp>Siobhán McIlvanney</scp>

Поетична і комунікативна функції у ранній французькій середньовічній драмі

Поетична і комунікативна функції у ранній французькій середньовічній драмі

‘The golden stain of time’: remembering the colours of Amiens Cathedral

This article explores the key role played by the faded polychromy of Notre-Dame d’Amiens, and notably of its liminal Vierge Dorée, in Victorian literary constructions of Early French Gothic, from William Morris’s pre-Guenevere prose writings in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856) to John Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens (1884), Walter Pater’s ‘Notre-Dame d’Amiens’ (1894), and Arthur Symons’s ‘Our Lady of Amiens’ (1903). Although Amiens Cathedral was the preferred Gothic edifice of none of these authors, it became a place of aesthetic pilgrimage in the second half of the nineteenth century for many Victorian artists and writers who longed to capture a glimpse of the vanishing colours of the medieval past in a rapidly changing industrial world. The Vierge Dorée presiding over the south transept thus came to encode, both metonymically and metaphorically, the ‘golden stain of time’, which Ruskin celebrated as ‘the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture’ and which Marcel Proust later interpreted as the creative union of ‘the nuance of the hour’ and ‘the colour of the ages’ in his own reading of these Victorian literary encounters with Amiens.

Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women's Press, 1758-1848 by Siobhán McIlvanney

MLR, .,   Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women’s Press, –. By S MI. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. .  pp.£. ISBN ––––. In this volume Siobhán McIlvanney traces the evolution of the early women’s press in France over a period of ninety years from its beginnings in  to the revolution of . She bridges a significant gap in scholarship by synthesizing a rich array of previous work on specific authors, periodicals, and historical contexts in a finely craed comparative study subtended by strong theoretical readings of the ways in which the women’s press, consisting for the most part of women journalists, gave voice to the concerns of their gender. e book examines representations of womanhood, both conventional and radical, in women’s journals, as well as the extratextual realities of women’s lives. e author is especially attentive to the implied readers of these journals, including their contributions in letters and articles. McIlvanney defines the term ‘feminist’ capaciously as that which challenges the pre-eminence of the masculine in culture and society. Aer an Introduction to the volume, a preliminary chapter provides socio-political context, tracing the roles ascribed to women as well as women’s actions to improve their position in what was a period of political volatility. e volume then focuses more specifically on the rise of the women’s press from its elitist origins to a medium with increasingly broader appeal and more diverse readership. Since the period from  to  was one of the most turbulent in French political and intellectual history, this chapter necessarily presents it using broad strokes. However, despite a certain unevenness, the focus on social class, gender, and journalism lends coherence to this historical overview and prepares the ground for subsequent chapters. e author structures the remaining chapters to reflect the multiple feminist strategies used in these journals, highlighting particular characteristics in various kinds of journal, from the first publications targeted at an elite group of wealthy, educated women to reformist journals such as the single issue of Les Étrennes Nationales des Dames (), La Femme Libre (–) associated with Saint-Simonian women, or La Voix des Femmes (), with its calls for cross-class solidarity. e volume unfolds in large part chronologically, reflecting fluctuations in the political and social climate, although it also highlights common projects, such as the interpellation of women readers to enter into dialogue and thus become textual producers, beginning with Le Journal des Dames (–). ere are also common themes, in particular the call for better education for girls and women, although the journals that appealed to working-class readers in the nineteenth century figured education as a means to a woman’s financial independence as well as an important component in her self-worth or when serving as a moral role model. McIlvanney’s analyses reveal that early fashion journals heightened the reader’s consciousness of herself as a consumer contributing to the national economy as well as a ‘sujet en devenir’ (p. ), active in her own self-construction. e author signals that the seemingly conservative turn to marriage and motherhood in the early domestic press included a feminist thrust: within the private sphere, letter writers could  Reviews express their feelings about their personal lives and marriages. As McIlvanney points out, ‘the radicalness of providing women readers with the opportunity to construct their own intimate subjectivities textually for the first time should not be underestimated’ (p. ). Ultimately, the dichotomy of private and public spheres breaks down in the liminal space of these journals, which offered readers a gendered community and raised awareness of women’s civic contributions to French society. B C M R-DF Writing the Landscape: Exposing Nature in French Women’s Fiction –. By C M. Cambridge: Legenda. .  pp. £. ISBN – –––. Recovering the works of women writers from the past and incorporating them into an established field of scholarship happens in stages. It begins with the crucial excavation work that leads to the publication of modern editions of texts, thereby increasing their accessibility. Next comes a period in which synthesizing overviews appear, introducing these new names, their lives and texts to wider audiences. In the final stage scholars...

Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women's Press, 1758–1848 by Siobhán McIlvanney

Reviewed by: Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women's Press, 1758–1848 by Siobhán McIlvanney Kate M. Bonin McIlvanney, Siobhán. Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women's Press, 1758–1848. Liverpool UP, 2019. ISBN 978-1-78694-188-6. Pp. 270. The period 1758 to 1848 spans ninety of the most turbulent years in French history. One of this period's important—but under-studied—cultural innovations is the advent of a French women's press: journals published for—and often by—French women. These publications ranged widely in subject and intended readership, often in tune with changing political regimes and the waxing or waning of press censorship laws. McIlvanney's study shows that there were daring (if only briefly in print) demands for women's rights in the early days of the 1789 and the 1848 revolutions. There were also longer periods during which the women's press was primarily occupied with the "unserious" topics of fashion, marriage, and homemaking, as women were consigned to domesticity and excluded from active participation in public life. Notwithstanding the limited scope of this "womanly" subject matter, it is McIlvanney's provocative thesis that "feminist tenets have always been present in the women's press alongside feminine ones" (15). Even during the misogynistic years of the Empire and the Restoration, the French women's press contained what McIlvanney terms "feminist elements" (11), in spite of its valorization of political passivity, domesticity, and consumerism. This is an eyebrow-raising thesis for those of us who grew up secure in the Woolf-inspired belief that one of women writers' chief occupations is to kill the [End Page 226] Angel in the House. However, McIlvanney argues that creating a journal specifically for women readers, with women-authored articles, was in itself an act with political repercussions: endowing women readers, writers (and even some women editors) "with a sense of social engagement which could not be erased" (73). In an era when female literacy was not a given, the fact that women's journals solicited and published correspondence from their readers created an important space for dialogue, encouraging readers to articulate and express their opinions in a public forum. Some of the arguments which McIlvanney marshals in support of this thesis feel a bit strained. For instance: the upper-class reader could find in fashion journals "the intellectual sustenance and supportive sense of sorority to aid her in her journey toward self-realization" (99–100). McIlvanney's best case for a common denominator linking these disparate journals across the decades lies in their shared, vocal desire for improved education for girls and women: from practical training for running a household, to the promotion of classes where girls and women could study subjects such as botany and natural history. As McIlvanney convincingly demonstrates, a clear realization that the available forms of instruction left women under-prepared for adult life—whatever they believed such a life ought to entail—subtends these publications: whether conservative, radical, or frivolous; whether aimed at a patrician, bourgeois, or working-class readership. In short, Figurations of the Feminine is a detailed, solidly useful contribution to women's history as well as cultural studies, spanning the end of the Ancien Regime through the rise of the Second Republic. Highly recommended. Kate M. Bonin Arcadia University (PA) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women’s Press, 1758–1848

Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women’s Press, 1758–1848

“Aid from the Indians Themselves”: Native Rivalries, Spanish Precedent, and French and English Colonialism

Accounts of the Spanish colonial conquests circulated widely throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in their original forms, in translations, and in edited collections. Modern historians have justly criticized how this literature perpetuated a narrative of European exceptionalism and superiority, but even the most Eurocentric accounts contained within them traces of a counternarrative of Spanish dependence on Indigenous allies rather than dominance over them. Furthermore, the writings of French and English would-be colonizers show that despite their prejudices against Spain, as they scoured this literature for clues as to how to repeat Spanish successes, some recognized how political divisions amongst Native people had proven crucial for the Spaniards. This precedent convinced them to pursue a strategy of seeking out political divisions amongst Natives in the hopes of creating intercultural alliances, a dynamic that played an important role in each early French and English colony in North America.

Finiteness and modality in early child French

ABSTRACTWe reexamine the distribution of nonfinite root forms (NRFs) in Child French on the basis of two novel spontaneous speech corpora focusing on two issues that have increasingly dominated recent analyses of French on the one hand and NRFs/RIs on the other. First, we argue that the level of NRF production peaking at ~24% is in line with the independent characterization of the language of exposure, Colloquial Spoken French, as a null-subject language. Second, we examine the contexts of NRF production and present quantitative data in support of the claim that early NRFs do not have a predominantly modal interpretation in French. Instead, a modal shift or increase over time in modal interpretation is observed that is reminiscent of the one identified in Dutch. We argue that this shift is tied to a greater level of syntactic complexity of French modals than their temporal counterparts: Temporal structures are monoclausal, while modal structures are biclausal. Overall, the results support the conclusion that an inability to systematically deploy adult-like syntactic structure plays an important role in early syntactic production and in explaining the distribution of NRFs in French.

Les Mots et les choses du théâtre: France, Italie, Espagne, xvie–xviie siècles. Sous la direction d’Anne Cayeula et Marc Vuillermoz

The present volume is a careful and complex interweaving of a number of critical concepts in theatre studies, examined from interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. It gathers together seventeen articles first presented in 2015 at the international conference ‘Les Mots et les choses du théâtre’, itself a corollary of the major project Les Idées du théâtre, which interrogates liminary dramatic material in France, Italy, and Spain across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Les Idées du théâtre has also produced an extensive online collection of theatrical paratexts (<www.idt.paris-sorbonne.fr> [accessed 4 February 2019]), widely celebrated as a valuable research tool, and the articles assembled in this volume are a testament to the possibilities presented by this project and database. Bringing together wide-ranging and lucid insights into early modern and Golden Age drama in France, Italy, and Spain, it sets out with great erudition and clarity the reciprocal relationship between ‘mots’ and ‘choses’ in theatre, also making a convincing case for greater scholarly attention to be paid to the dramatic paratext. Although the arguments proposed in this collection are dense and largely interconnected, the volume is structured into five sections, which renders it more easily accessible to the general reader and to specialists in search of precise material. The first section focuses on the dramatic author and incorporates detailed studies of theatrical lexis: the term ‘travail’, for instance, is investigated and contextualized within dramatic culture; the power and significance of metaphor in liminary material is also considered in relation to the playwright. The second section moves on to aesthetics and dramaturgy and brings out more strongly the Foucauldian link between ‘mots’ and ‘choses’ in theatre: here, a particularly engaging article by Enrica Zanin traces frameworks of theatrical vocabulary in the earliest French, Italian, and Spanish dictionaries, drawing fascinating parallels with the reality of the practices denoted by this vocabulary. Turning to dramatic genres, the third section re-assesses the process of identifying a play with a genre and uses paratexts to explore how such classification can influence, undermine, or enhance the public understanding and reception of a comedy. The fourth section centres on actors and characters, presenting some innovative work on the often overlooked tension between author and performer; a further concern in this cluster is the French imitation of Italian comic stock types, frequently employed to political and polemical ends. The final section focuses on reception and evaluates the nature and impact of dramatic theory and the prologue in France, Italy, and Spain, also taking stock of the language of laughter and moral elevation in theatrical comic paratexts. Together these sections form a rich and productive discussion not only of theatrical practices in three countries which led the way for dramatic culture, but also of lexical, ideological, and transnational exchange across the centuries in question. This volume makes a substantial contribution to theatre studies and scholars of drama and of comparative literature will find it an exciting and insightful read.

Early French and German Central Bank Charts and Regulations

In some recent studies, the question of the origins of central banking has been revisited, suggesting that beyond Swedish and British central banking, a number of earlier European continental institutions would also have played an important role. However, it has often been difficult to access the charters and regulations of these early central banks – in particular in English. This paper contributes to closing this gap by introducing and providing translations of some charters and regulations of six pre 1800 central banks in France and Germany. The six early public banks displayed varying levels of success and duration, and qualify to a different degree as central banks. An overview table maps the articles of the early central banks’ charters and regulations into key central banking topics. The texts also provide evidence of the role of central banking legislation, and of the distinction between, on the one side, the statutes and charters of the banks, and on the other side the operational aspects which tend to be framed by separate rules and regulations. Finally, the texts provide evidence of the policy objectives of early central banks, including in particular those of a monetary nature. To put these documents into context, the objectives, balance sheet structure, achievements and closure of each central bank are briefly summarised. JEL Classification: E32, E5, N23