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These five excerpts come from two letter books that belonged to Joseph Franchetti (ca. 1720-ca. 1794), a successful Jewish merchant of Mantuan origins based in Tunis. At the time of the correspondence (1776-1790), Franchetti was a chief partner in the _Salomone_ _Enriches & Joseph Franchetti_ _Company_, a family-based trading firm with interests in Tunis, Livorno, and Smyrna. In the 1770s and 1780s, the core of Franchetti’s business was the sale of Tunisian _chechias_. These hats, made in Tunis with European wool acquired from Livorno, were highly sought after in the Ottoman Empire, with Smyrna serving as key distribution center. The strategic arrangement of the Enriches and Franchetti Company, with its presence on three Mediterranean coasts, placed these entrepreneurs at the forefront of the _chechia_ trade in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
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Jacques de Vitry (b. ca. 1160, d. 1240) was one of the most famous preachers of the high Middle Ages. Born in northern France, he studied at the University of Paris, and in 1210 became a canon regular in the diocese of Liège. Jacques’s most popular collection, the *Sermones vulgares vel ad status,* contains sermons recorded in Latin but designed to be preached in the vulgar tongue to laypeople, and arranged according the social class and profession of the audience. The sermon transcribed and translated here appears in Jacques’s less popular collection—the *Sermones dominicales et festivales.* Less popular, because the sermons were preached to largely clerical, not necessarily elite, audiences, and because of the lack of the lively *exempla* (illustrative anecdotes) for which Jacques was well known. There is no modern edition of these sermons, and so they are rarely studied. The sermon was intended for the third Sunday of Lent.
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The following document is a police dossier drawn from the Y series of the Archives Nationales. Compiled by a neighborhood commissioner named Louis- Pierre Regnard, the dossier contains testimony pertaining to the case of François Fromard, a journeyman quarry worker who hanged himself in his apartment in a working-class neighborhood of Paris on 29 May 1750. According to the testimony of his wife and neighbors, Fromard saw police agents everywhere and, before taking his own life, had become convinced that he was going to be arrested and imprisoned. No one, however, gave any indication that the police were really pursuing him. The dangers he saw lurking all around him were figments of his imagination, or, as one witness eloquently described it, of his “wounded imagination” (_imagination blessée_).
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The following texts come from a trial of Catherine Mundt, tried in 1693, for infanticide, and interrogated under torture. The records are preserved in the Stadt Archiv Braunschweig.
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