French History Holdings in the Folger Library

Of particular interest to the historian of early modern France is the 199-volume collection of diplomatic dispatches, private letters, aidememoires, and varia translated by clerks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for use by the rich and politically powerful Strozzi family of Florence.2 The bulk of the Strozzi transcripts-some seventy volumes-consists of the letters posted from the Roman curia to the nuncios and internuncios in France, Spain, and the Low Countries, with their replies. The troubled decades of the first half of the seventeenth century are vividly pictured in the correspondence of the papal secretary of state with Guido Bentevoglio, nuncio to France from 1617 to 1630;3 in the letters to Nicolo Bagni, the papal agent in Paris during the Frondes;4 and in the letters from the papal chancery to their agents in France between 1649 and 1653.5 The broader course of the Thirty

Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity