Documentary heritage and archives
The University of Montpellier has a rich documentary heritage: printed works, manuscripts, archives, drawings and engravings. Most of this heritage is preserved in the university libraries.
Printed works
Our print collections range from the earliest days of printing to the present day. Rich and varied, they include 300 incunabula, hundreds of thousands of printed volumes from the 16th to the 19th century (books and periodicals), and specialized collections often resulting from donations. Encyclopedism is the watchword of these collections, not only because they are housed in libraries covering all major disciplines, but also because they were generally conceived with a broad and generous vision of knowledge, as "honest man's libraries" with the ambition of providing the richest possible access to knowledge.
BU History of the Faculty of Medicine
The BU Historique de Médecine houses 100,000 volumes printed before the 19th century, half of which relate to medicine and the other half to all facets of knowledge: languages and literature, history, geography and travel, physical and natural sciences. You'll also find old medical theses from Montpellier and Paris from the 18th century onwards.
BU Sciences
The heart of the BU Sciences' heritage collections is the library of the former Faculty of Science, created in 1809. This collection has since been supplemented by prestigious bequests, such as those from Dunal (1857) and Girard, Jeanjean and Gergonne. It is particularly rich in works on botany, zoology, mathematics and astronomy. There are also numerous works from the collection of Candolle, the famous Geneva botanist, as well as a unique collection of glass photographic plates dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
BU Richter - Law, political science, economics, management
The BU Richter holds over 22,000 patrimonial documents from the 16th century to the mid-20th century, including 500 volumes of law and economics dating from before the end of the 18th century. The BU Richter is also home to a number of special collections resulting from donations and bequests: the Antonelli, Barthélemy and Geddes collections.
On the premises of the University Library of Law, Economics and Management, you have access to the scientific and cultural heritage of the Montpellier Academy of Sciences and Letters. Heir to the Société Royale des Sciences created by Louis XIV in 1706, the Académie des Sciences et Lettres de Montpellier was founded under its current name in 1846. Dealing with science, literature and medicine, it built up a library in 1921, which today boasts 50,0000 books, brochures and periodicals from the 18th century to the present day, over half of which are in foreign languages.
BU Pharmacy
The BU Pharmacie-PACES houses the collections transferred in 1886 from the Montpellier School of Pharmacy, which included donations from professors François-Joseph Rey (1758-1826) and François-Hugues Romeo Pouzin (1795-1860), as well as from the Montpellier School of Agriculture. This collection of 5,000 documents is both local and encyclopedic. Botany and zoology account for a quarter of the volumes; pharmacy and its history, medicine and toxicology, as well as belles lettres, philosophy and geography, also feature prominently.
For full details of the various heritage collections, visit the BU website.
Manuscripts
The most prestigious manuscripts are housed in the BU Historique de Médecine. This collection comprises 900 manuscripts, two-thirds of them from the medieval period, covering all fields of knowledge.
For the Middle Ages, literature dominates: classics, romances of chivalry (a Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes, three copies of the Roman de la Rose), Italian poets such as Dante and Petrarch. Next come religious manuscripts: richly illustrated Bibles, Korans, theological sums, lives of saints, breviaries and missals. The essential medical texts are here: Hippocrates and Galen, Avicenna, Albucasis (in two illuminated copies, one of which in the Gascon language belonged to Gaston Phébus) and Arnaud de Villeneuve, or Gui de Chauliac and Roger de Parme with their surgeries. Music, including an 11th-century Tonaire and a magnificent 13th-century chansonnier, law and philosophy are also present.
Fifty-nine manuscripts date from the Carolingian era, including the oldest in the collection, a psalter from 780 that belonged to a member of Charlemagne's family. Others date from the 16th century - a superb Portulan combining medieval cartography and major discoveries, the 17th century - correspondence from Christine of Sweden - or the 18th century - lectures by doctors from Montpellier. Bringing together such a wide range of manuscripts in the heart of a medical faculty is unparalleled, and constitutes the library's real treasure trove and originality.
Handwritten documents can also be found in specialized collections, such as the Gergonne collection at BU Sciences.
Archives
The archives are a unique and indispensable source for scientific research into the history, organization and development of the school, as well as its teaching and research.
Some of the oldest administrative archives are now held by the Hérault departmental archives, while others are held by university libraries. The latter are the legal depositories for theses and hold some of the collections of professors they have donated.
For modern and contemporary archives, the records are kept by each faculty and their processing is coordinated by the archives department. Several collections have been classified and inventoried, and in some cases transferred to the Hérault departmental archives. Other transfer projects are in progress.
Depending on the period you are interested in, you can contact either of these departments.
Archives of the Faculty of Medicine
The ancient collection (13th-18th centuries) is preserved and managed by the university library. An inventory of this collection was drawn up by Joseph Calmette, archivist-paleographer, and published in 1912 in the second part of volume 2 of the Cartulaire de l'Université de Montpellier.
The modern archives (19th-20th centuries) are managed by the university's archives department. Some of these archives have been classified and inventoried.
You can consult :
- archives relating to the general administration of the Faculty of Medicine from 1794 to 1981
- educational archives from 1739 to 1982
- 643 posters from the Faculty of Medicine dating from 1862 to 1985
- as well as numerous registers of matriculation, examination registrations, examination results and theses from the 19th and 20th centuries.
The inventories can be downloaded from the online section below.
The library provides access to both collections in accordance with the rules governing access to public archives. In addition, all readers are subject to the law on the re-use of public data.
Archives of the Faculty of Law and Economics
The original Liber Rectorum is held by the University Library of Medicine under the symbol H595. This document contains statutes, regulations, concessions and confirmations of privileges from 1326 to 1523. A seventeenth-century copy of the Liber Rectorum is held by the archives départementales in series D (archives prior to 1790).
Individual student files, teaching timetables, registers of council and assembly deliberations, etc. have also been kept in the Hérault departmental archives since 1997, under reference 8ETP (Université de Montpellier 1 - Enseignement du droit, de la médecine, de la pharmacie, de la gestion, de l'odontologie, des sciences du sport (1800-1985)).
The most recent archives are kept at the faculty.
Archives of the Faculty of Pharmacy
The 19th and 20th century registers held by the faculty are currently being transferred to the Archives départementales de l'Hérault.
The most recent archives are also kept at the faculty.
Faculty of Science Archives
The archives of the Faculty of Science were deposited with the Hérault departmental archives in 2014.
The most recent are kept at the faculty.
On line
Access part of the university's heritage resources online, free of charge, thanks to the digitization work carried out by the inter-university documentary cooperation service as part of the Foli@ online heritage library. The first corpus digitized represents over 90,000 issues of medieval manuscripts, early printed documents (15th-19th centuries) on the history of Montpellier medicine and pharmacy, the history of botany, and 18th-century optical views.
The archive inventories can be downloaded by clicking on the following links:
