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This essay discusses diarist and collector Pierre de Estoile of Paris, France, focusing on how his collecting activities of ephemeral print and print culture of the French Wars of Religion exemplified record keeping in the early modern period. He created a scrapbook he entitled "Drolleries of the League" which featured printed works created between the 1585 treaty of Péronne until the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which declared that all records of the wars should be destroyed and erased.

This article looks at the collections, and the collecting habits, of two sixteenth-century Frenchmen: the lawyer Pierre de l'Estoile and the surgeon François Rasse des Noeux. Both men were virtuoso collectors of 'outspoken words', the circumstantial pamphlets, songs, libels, graffiti, and whispered rumours that characterized the French Wars of Religion. Both men organized their collections in ways to give them coherence and meaning. In the case of L'Estoile, the collected ephemera were accompanied by a Register-Journal and Memoires, which reflect on his collecting process and the dangers of owning a potentially scandalous and actionable collection. The article ends with some reflections on the hunt for meanings by modern students of this circumstantial material, and argues that often this 'meaning' is to be found in the culture of collecting itself, rather than in unravelling specific mysteries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The drawings collection of the Venetian nobleman Gabriele Vendramin (1484–1552) is the earliest major collection that is documented. Three primary sources, the first dated 1530, make it possible to chart the evolution of the collection over the last two decades of Vendramin’s life, to identify important works which it contained, to recognize the high value attached to the drawings and to understand how they were presented and conserved. The most important source, the inventory composed between 1567 and 1569, has not previously been fully scrutinized from the point of view of the drawings. The collection included works attributed to Raphael, Jacopo and Giovanni Bellini, Mantegna, Parmigianino and Domenico Campagnola. Drawings were not the only objects Vendramin collected, or indeed the main ones. Collecting drawings was still a new activity in the early sixteenth century and evaluating Vendramin’s practices and priorities helps to illuminate this formative period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]