Unearthing Hidden Gems: The Lettres de Jersey
In January of this year, an intriguing ILL request came to O’Neill. The requesting librarian, located in the UK, noted that ordinarily she wouldn’t make a transatlantic request, but the title needed, a volume of the Jesuit publication Lettres de Jersey, was vanishingly rare. After fulfilling the request with a scanned volume, Anne Kenny contacted Betsy Post, Head of Digital Repository Services, to find out if we were interested in digitizing the entire run of the publication. We agreed to look into it, and ended up astonished by what we found.
The Lettres–published correspondence of Jesuits living on the island of Jersey in the English Channel–ran as a periodical from 1882 to 1939, with a hiatus during the years of World War I. Our holdings begin with 1893, making them one of the most complete sets in the world. But how did BC end up with this nearly complete set?
We kept digging, partly to resolve the mystery, but also for pragmatic reasons, including copyright. Because of copyright issues related to digitization of a post-1923 title, I contacted the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, where Seth Meehan graciously agreed to help us acquire a license from the relevant authorities in Rome. (Once digitization is complete, the journals will be available on the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and also on the IAJS-hosted Jesuit Online Library.)
Aside from a license, the other pre-digitization requirement was a brush-up of the cataloging, particularly with more complete and accurate holdings records. This was carried out by Larry Busenbark, who decided to do a little more digging into why a French-language publication was being issued from Jersey, an historically English-speaking Crown dependency. The dates of publication, beginning in 1882, provided a striking clue.
Jesuit-run schools were outlawed in France in 1880 under the Jules Ferry laws, and most of the Order left the country. The French-speaking population of Jesuits on Jersey was largely composed of priests waiting for the law’s repeal and their chance to return. During their time on the island, they founded a monastery and tried to keep their identity as a learning-centered scholastic group. Intriguingly, on their eventual return to France, members of this group of Jesuits founded the Bibliothèque des Fontaines in Chantilly.
Those familiar with the history of the Boston College Libraries will remember that when the Bibliothèque des Fontaines eventually closed in the mid-1990s, we purchased many of their books, still marked today in the catalog as the “Chantilly” collection. Our copies of the Lettres were a part of this purchase, a hidden clue to the origins of the collection itself. We’re thrilled to bring this history finally to light, and share it with the world in digital reproduction.
Please look forward to the availability of the fully-digitized Lettres de Jersey, one of several Jesuit correspondence journals in various stages of the digitization process. The Boston College Libraries are proud to continue our work in making these rare resources and others like them available on a global scale.
