Sources

CESAR was launched by three scholars, acting as its co-editors: Jeffrey Ravel at MIT (USA), the late Barry Russell at Oxford Brookes University (UK), and the late David Trott at the University of Toronto (Canada).

[JR] Jeffrey Ravel has contributed the contents of French PIECE, a digital version of Clarence D. Brenner's 1947 list of 11,641 plays written between 1700 and 1789. He and his research assistants are currently preparing digital versions of the daily performance registers of the Comédie-Française (1680-1774, based on Henry C. Lancaster's published extracts) and the Comédie-Italienne (1716-1793, based on Brenner's published extracts), as well as publication and re-edition data for texts of eighteenth-century French plays.

[BR] Barry Russell supplied data gathered for his Calendrier des spectacles sous Louis XIV, part of an online exploration of Les Théâtres de la Foire à Paris, and designed the technical infrastructure.

[DT] David Trott made available the contents of his personal database, developed between 1988 and 2000, reflecting his interests in French popular theatre, franco-italian theatre, private theatre, parades and théâtre de la foire. He also built or contributed to inventories on women's theatre, opera parodies and 'théâtres de société', with a view both to expanding them and integrating the essence of their contents into César files. Until shortly before his death, he was also keying-in or coordinating the entry of performance data for theatres beyond the confines of the official stages of Paris.

A team of researchers led by Emmet Kennedy at George Washington University generously contributed a substantial database they had developed on Parisian theater during the Revolutionary decade of the 1790s. Kennedy and his team had already made their results available in a print publication (Emmet Kennedy, Marie-Laurence Netter, James P. McGregor, and Mark V. Olsen, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris: Analysis and Repertory (Greenwood Press, Westport Conn. and London, 1996. ISBN: 0-313-28960-3.) Data from this resource have been incorporated into CESAR.

[JC] Jan Clarke at the University of Durham (UK) has given us full access to the electronic data on which her study of the Théâtre de l'Hôtel Guénégaud is based, together with additional data derived from Lagrange's Registre and elsewhere. This is now being incorporated gradually. For further information on Dr Clarke's work, The Guénégaud Theatre in Paris (1673-1680) (2 vols published, vol.3 forthcoming) see her publisher's site at www.mellenpress.com.

[PB] Having worked on the fairground actor and entrepreneur Louis Lécluse de Thilloy dit Lécluze (1711 - 1792), Pierre Baron of the University of Paris IV is currently reconstructing and inputting the cast-lists for productions advertised by the Opéra-Comique de Pontau et de Monnet.

[ML] The late Maurice Lever, formerly Directeur de recherche at the CNRS (CELLF 17/18), built details of actors under the Ancien Régime into the cast-lists for specific performances. They included Dorothée Dorinville dite Luzy, Sophie Arnould, Louise Rosalie Lefèvre, épouse Dugazon, Raymond Rochard de Bouillac, Louis Michel, Mlle Duthé, Carlo Bertinazzi dit Carlin, et Louise Adélaïde Berton-Maisonneuve dite Doligny.

[MN] Martin Nadeau, a historian working on the Parisian theatre during the French Revolution, contributed to CESAR material from two sources he had used in his work: (a) reviews of plays published in several newspapers during the 1790s and (b) police reports, held at the Archives Nationales in Paris, written by "agents" of the Ministre de l'Intérieur who were watching theatres during the Terror and the Directorial period.

[GdeL] Loup-Géraud de Lavedan de Casaubon is allowing us to benefit from his researches in the Municipal Archives in Toulouse, where he has found valuable information concerning the public theatre in that town during the eighteenth century. He has already entered data on over a thousand performances during the 1780s.

[JPhVA] Jean-Philippe van Aelbrouck, author of the Dictionnaire des danseurs à Bruxelles de 1600 à 1830 (Liège, Mardaga, 1993) and of a doctoral thesis on itinerant actors in Brussels during the eighteenth century, is entering the results of his research into CESAR, including information on some six hundred actors who performed during the eighteenth century in what was to become Belgium.

[GF] Georges Forestier, Director of the Centre de Recherche sur l'Histoire du Théâtre at the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, is contributing, from his wide knowledge of the theatre, valuable details on specific plays and individuals of the seventeenth century.

[FR] Françoise Rubellin, professor at the University of Nantes and Director of the Centre for Fairground Theatre Studies, is sharing with us the results of her own research and that of her team working on the fairground theatre and other aspects of eighteenth-century theatre history.

[AE] Aurore Evain, secrétaire adjointe of SIEFAR (Société Internationale pour l'Etude des Femmes de l'Ancien Régime), is providing us with information relating to women (playwrights, actresses, musicians) active in the theatre during the Ancien Régime.

Many others have also contributed and are continuing to add to the database and the information supporting the imagebank. For a complete list of our contributors and the initials used to identify them, click here.