Le fonds Léon de Rosny et la circulation des savoirs au XIX^e siècle. Trois ouvrages de la Bibliothèque municipale de Lille

The article aims to examine the curious intersection between Rosny’s life and the history of the three books stored in his collection, in view of presenting a typical example of nineteenth century circulation of knowledge. The first document is a copy of Gützlaff’s Gospel of John hand-written by Rosny in 1854. The famous translation printed in Singapore in 1837 is the first Bible translated into Japanese. It is interesting to notice that the document was in great demand among the European Orientalists keen to learn the katakana. Second, we would like to focus on a Japanese version of the well-known Kaikoku zushi, the collection which radically transformed some bushi into revolutionaries and for which Stanislas Julien wrote a book review in Journal asiatique (1847). While the one in Lille is only a special reprint focusing on the USA from the important collection, it still accurately reflects the strong Japanese awareness of the crisis of the time. The last book to mention is Fuei shinsetsu, an annotated version of the treatise on obstetrics written in Chinese by Benjamin Hobson, an English medical missionary based in China. The book was offered to Rosny by a young member of the Second Japanese Embassy to Europe (1864). Thus, the article will propose some insights to understand the international context which led to the start of Japanese studies in Europe.