Sylvaine Guyot, Jeffrey S. Ravel (dir.), Données, recettes & répertoire. La scène en ligne (1680-1793) / Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online. 1680-1793, MIT Press, 2020.

Presentation

This work is an innovative collection of original essays that explore an important initiative in the digital humanities, the Comédie-Française Registers Project (CFRP). Databases, Revenues, & Repertory takes advantage of this unique online archive to explore programming and pricing decisions made by the royal troupe in Paris during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, while assessing the research possibilities created by digital methodologies in humanities scholarship and theater history.

Several essays in the volume explore the long-term trends in box-office receipts and repertory decisions across the century, while others focus on the critical years around 1760, when the influence of Enlightenment ideals and authors made itself felt on the French capital’s premier stage. A third set of essays considers the uses of digital humanities methodologies in the social history of theater and in the humanities more generally—how new are the research procedures and conclusions of digital humanists, how do these applications reshape the questions we ask of literature and cultural history, and how do they expand our sensory understanding of the past?

More info: see editor's website