Œuvres complètes. Section III , Histoire, Tome 2. Histoire de Don Pèdre I er, roi de Castille, et autres écrits sur l'histoire de l'Espagne (review)

This volume, the first to be published of a new Œuvres complètes, contains Prosper Mérimée's Histoire de Don Pèder (first published in 1848), "Philippe ii et Don Carlos" (a review of W.H. Prescott's 1855 book on the Spanish king), and a review of Circourt and Puymaigre's 1867 translation of a fifteenth-century biography entitled, Le Victorial. The Oeuvres complètes project is under the coordination of both Antonia Fonyi (for the sections devoted to Mérimée's fiction and his historical writing) and Françoise Bercé (who will oversee the section focused on the Inspecteur de monuments historique's art criticism and archeological notes and essays).

While there have been some good editions of Mérimée's fiction (editions by Josserand, Parturier, and Crouzet spring to mind), it has been nearly a century since an attempt has been made to publish Mérimée's complete works. Pierre Trahard and Edouard Champion published twelve-volumes of an Œuvres complètes in the late 1920s and early 30s. But they initially intended some thirty volumes, leaving the "complètes" portion of their title more a goal than a reality. Since then Maurice Parturier published seventeen volumes of Mérimée's complete correspondence (in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s). But even with Parturier's research, fully contextualizing Mérimée's works has remained difficult in part because a large number of texts did not appear in Trahard's collection. As a result, researchers have been forced to visit rare book rooms in far off places or plead with libraries to copy or scan articles that have not been reprinted since their original publications and to look for updated introductions in disparate editions of Mérimée's works.

If this first volume is any indication, the new Œuvres complètes will provide complete and well-researched contextualization, ample notes, variants, and helpful indexes for all of Mérimée's works. The collection, which will eventually expand to seventeen volumes (six in Literature, six in Art and Archeology, four in History, and one other "hors section" volume), promises to spark a renaissance of sorts in Mérimée studies since it will provide access to a number of previously hard to find texts and allow researchers to make new connections between the very different types of works that make up Mérimée's œuvre.

Whether this particular volume was published first for strategic reasons or for reasons of expediency, its publication symbolically suggests a willful intent on the part of the editors to underscore Mérimée's expertise in fields beyond literature. In addition to publishing out of print or unedited works and offering substantial context for Mérimée's publications, the collection's coordinators have sought the help of some forty collaborators with expertise in many different fields to edit the volumes. Michel Garcia and Joseph Pérez wrote the introductions and notes for the three works in this volume. Garcia, professor emeritus of Spanish literature and medieval Spanish history at Paris iii, and Pérez, professor emeritus of Spanish history at the Université Bordeaux iii, examine Mérimée not as a fictional author who dabbled in history but first and foremost as a serious contributor to the field of Spanish history.

Pérez situates Mérimée's work on Philippe ii and Don Carlos within the context of work by other nineteenth-century historians on the subject (576). He concludes: "Mérimée réussit le tour de force de mettre les choses au point...