The Trade in French Books in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract

Throughout the Middle Ages cultivated readers in Ireland were aware of intellectual developments in Europe, currents in French thought reaching Ireland through England, or directly from continental sources. However, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw a noticeable increase in the educated readership interested in French literature: works in French were imported by Dublin booksellers in the last two decades of the seventeenth century, and there is also evidence that books from England, Holland and France passed through the other major Irish ports before 1700 (Pollard, p. 160). Thus, by the early eighteenth century a varied diet of French-language works in areas such as literature, religion, history, voyages, architecture, antiquities, music, medicine and the sciences could be obtained in Ireland. French Enlightenment texts became available through the Dublin and London book trades, forming an identifiable strand in imported French-language material, especially after 1750.