Dramatis Personae Archive / Programme / About This Site

During spring semester 2006, the graduate and undergraduate students of French 4900/7900: Dramatis Personae, a seminar on early modern performance under the direction of Dr. Christine Jones, created this site. We have designed this site to be useful to researchers of theater, dance, music, French culture, and early modern history. It is an intellectual exploration of early modern performance and a unique archive of web-based resources that showcases rare books in their historical context. It serves also as a portal into the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library’s Digital Collections, which includes scanned rare books, maps, newspapers, and journals in searchable format. The collection of books on dance and theater scanned under the auspices of the "Dramatis Personae" project is unique to Marriott Library. Few of these books have been published in their entirety in a modern print or digital edition. We have reproduced the rarest editions in full text and unique excerpts from other volumes with the intention of bringing these exceptional books to light, highlighting particular elements in these editions that we feel are of interest to scholarship. It is our hope that the commentaries provided in English on this site will aid scholars, students and casual observers alike in discovering and appreciating early modern performance.

This website would not have been possible without a generous grant from the University of Utah Teaching Committee and the enthusiastic support of the Rare Books Division staff of the Marriott Library. Special thanks to Luise Poulton, Curator of the Rare Books Division, who identified the bibliography and coordinated digitizing, and provided an intellectual foundation as well as a practical work space for our study of these books as rare objects. Her guidance and encouragement has been invaluable.