The
Ranums'
Panat Times
Volume 1, redone Dec. 2014
A Manuscript about French Secretaries of State, 1300-1647
BnF ms. Cinq Cents Colbert 136/Ms. Fr. 18236,
entitled:
Mémoires sur l'Établissement des Secrétaires d'Estat et des Clercs Notaires et Secrétaires du roy et Secrétaires des Finances
Introduction
A typescript of this manuscript has lain in our files for over forty years. We want to make it available to other scholars.
(Click here for Orest's Presentation of the manuscript.)
NOTE: This transcription is not copyrighted. You may make as many copies as you wish and distribute them to scholars, students, libraries. In fact, if you would like the entire file sent to you via an attachment, please send us an e-mail.
The manuscript begins with an account of the origins of the secretaries of state, from the early fourteenth century on. To facilitate consultation, we have divided it into a number of parts
The first three parts are chronological:
The 14th century
The
15th century
The
16th century
The biographies of the secretaries are subdivided into 5 more or less chronological files.
Secretaries 1
discusses Guillaume Bochetel;
Claude de l'Aubespine le père (d. 1567); Cosme
Clausse; Jean du Thier; Jacques
Bourdin; Jean Robertet; Claude
Robertet; Claude de l'Aubespine le fils (d.
1570); Simon Fizes; Nicolas de Neufville
le père; Nicolas de Neufville le fils
Secretaries
2
discusses Pierre Brulard; Claude
Pinart le père; Claude Pinart le fils; Gilles
Brulard; Claude de l'Aubespine, fils
de Gilles; Louis Revol; Martin Ruzé;
Louis Potier de Gesvres
Secretaries
3
discusses Pierre Forget; Nicolas
Neufville de Villeroy; Antoine de Loménie;
Pierre Brulard de Puisieux
Secretaries
4
discusses Henri-Auguste de Loménie de la Ville-aux-Clercs;
Claude Mangot; Armand-Jean de Richelieu;
Raymond Phélyppeaux d'Herbault; Nicolas Potier
d'Ocquerre; Charles de Beauclerc
Secretaries
5
discusses Abel Servien; François
Sublet des Noyers; Louis Phélyppeaux de la Vrillière;
Michel Le Tellier; Henri-Auguste de Loménie de
Brienne
A note from Patricia Ranum about the transcription of the Mémoires sur l'Établissement des Secrétaires d'Estat
Circa 1960 I transcribed Ms. Fr. 18236 by hand, then made a typed
copy that I checked with the original. That done, Orest and I apparently
decided that the version in Cinq Cents Colbert 136 was slightly more
accurate as far as facts were concerned. I therefore went back and
marked the entire transcript of Ms. Fr. 18236 in red pencil, to show how
it differed from CCC 136. I also checked the transcript with the other
versions of the Mémoire, especially Cangé 4591, with its
supplementary information. Finally, I retyped a goodly part of the
transcript; but for some reason, I stopped at fol. 469. (And as I typed,
I either discarded the first version, or we lost it somewhere along the
way.)
Therefore, when I began to retype the remaining pages for this
edition, for each line I had to decode the layers of colors — red
pencil changes (CCC 136) versus the original typescript with its
corrections in black ballpoint (Ms. Fr. 18236). Owing to the fact that
the first half of the surviving transcript reproduces CCC 136 (fols.
347-469), I decided to privilege the red markings and to use the folio
numbers of CCC 136. A word of caution, however. On several sheets of my
old transcript, I neglected to mark the folio numbers for CCC 136: in
the current transcription I therefore briefly resort to the foliotation
of Ms. Fr. 18236, underlined.
In sum, although Orest discusses "Ms. Fr. 18236" throughout his Presentation, the foliotation and the spelling of these Mémoires are, in the main, those of the version preserved in Cinq Cents Colbert 136.
More than forty years later, I realize that the absence of capitalization and accent marks smacks of the 1960s — indeed, conflicts with the editing practices set forth by Barbiche and his colleagues. However, I dared not stray from the transcription made over four decades ago, for fear I create a monster that is one step more hybrid than this final, patently hybrid transcription.