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The alchemical works of Thomas Norton (The Ordinal of Alchemy) and George Ripley (The Compound of Alchemy) are two of the most important testimonies of the popularity of alchemy in England, in the second half of the fifteenth- century. Nevertheless, they generally have been studied only for their pseudo-scientific content, and very much depreciated. However, their writers address, especially in their prologues, some important questions on literature, language and knowledge, and also on the prince and the relations of power in the society. Their choice to transmit a discipline located at the junction of science and art (in the medieval sense of the term) and characterized by secrecy, in a poetical form and in an accessible vernacular language, raises, indeed, many interrogations. It points to the facts that the established boundaries between literary and scientific texts are not always pertinent; that in the second half of the fifteenth-century, English has indeed became a language of transmission of knowledge. Overall, these alchemical treatises in verse contribute to the formation of a lay culture marked by its English identity. At the same time, they are an invitation to think about the multiplicity and the complexity of contemporary conceptions of knowledge – even with regards to a specific type of knowledge, alchemy. Finally, the political aspects of these texts are important: both Norton, and more openly, Ripley, want to help to transform the prince, who must be actor and object of this change, to improve the governance of the country. This is all the more necessary in a political society destabilized by the Wars of the Roses.

In the 19th century, printed books largely spread throughout Hispanic America and in Peru in particular. Books reached a wider scale just when a genuine national literature was emerging. Because they were not only judges but fulfilled political, social or cultural duties too, Peruvian high magistrates were at the center of this silent revolution. As politicians at the head of ministries, assemblies and parliaments, they wrote legislative and administrative texts. As lawyers, jurists and jurisconsults, they set up new Peruvian law, writing the first codes and constitutions among others. They used books or notes taken by their students to pass on their knowledge to the youngest in their law firms or at university. In short, written work was central to their life. Some even ventured in fields that were, at first sight, not their duty or office, such as literature, linguistics or translation. Being major actors in the budding Peruvian state and nation, high magistrates thus appear as great producers of written works, a large part of which has been kept. Studying their book collections enables us to grasp the link they established with printed work. Three of these – corresponding to different generations of magistrates – reveal especially rich and noteworthy. They shall be analyzed in detail in the present work. The first one, belonging to the Peruvian Supreme Court first president, Manuel Lorenzo Vidaurre (1773-1841), looks like a book collection of the Enlightment in many ways: it gathers together books dealing with various subjects and contents, suggesting real desire for encyclopedic knowledge. The two others belong to the next generation magistrates – Toribio Pacheco (1828-1868) and Mariano Felipe Paz Soldan (1821-1886) –, republicans born after the independence of Peru who tried to lead their country up the rank of great nations. Many more law books can be found there, as well as lots of Peruvian history and geography ones. These three collections hint at their owners' intellectual richness, their connections with European culture and the discovery of national identity. Far from being mere decorative objects, the owning of books sheds light on a period of time in Peruvian history – the first republican decade – that has been scarcely studied.

Between 1880 and 1920, the French book is present in Italy under various forms: in original version, as in translation. As such, it is a major vector of the French culture, which can be exactly measured thanks to the national bibliographical series organized from 1885 to list the works published in Italy and the foreign works acquired by the Italian libraries. In an expanding editorial market, the translation of French books, and particularly popular novels taken from serials of the Parisian press, is the major vector of the conquest of new publics, arisen from the progress of the elimination of illiteracy. This French tropism in the Italian cultural sphere also meets in the field of the direct importation. Widely present in the funds of the public libraries as private, the book written in French is a major support of the distribution of the academic knowledges in fields as the history, the social sciences or the medicine.

When Philip VI ascended the throne, Pierre Remi, the treasurer of Charles IV and his trusted confidant, suffered the same fate as favorites before and since: condemned to death he was executed on 25 April 1328. Remi was a scapegoat: the new king sacrificed him in hopes of opening the way to political consensus, in order to regenerate the monarchy. Philip VI profited notably from the execution, seizing Remi's immense fortune, of which he disposed in the next eight years, in 41 separate grants; and he barely kept any part of it. Three groups benefited from the royal grants: some creditors of the monarchy were thus paid a part of their dues; the counselors and the barons of the king were rewarded to their support for the new king; and eventually some modest servants, frequently employed at the royal hotel, were thanked by such gifts. The redistribution of Remi's fortune may have responded to financial and political necessities, or may appear as free and useless grants. Whatever, it allowed the king to keep his role of patron over his servants. It also attested, throughout the kingdom, to the capacity of the new ruler for giving; a capacity essential to reign since gifts, along with judicial favor, constituted one of the two fundamentals of a royal government ruled by favor.Gifts and confiscations are two complementary forms of asset circulation. As the theory of the inalienability of the royal domain develops, both are made inseparable. The fallen favorites, like Pierre Remi, attest for that: they accumulate gifts from the king, they even monopolize them. But at their downfall, they are deprived of them for the profit of some new beneficiaries of royal gifts. The king is overall the master of this circulation of wealth: it does not provide him with any material profit but allows him to regenerate constantly his power.

Pearls have bewitched jewellers, travellers, writers or achimists for centuries. Since antiquity, a « pearl road » has connected the great pearl basins to the west European markets. However, the period between 1880-1910 is a « key moment » in pearl trade history. As a matter of fact, these decades represent the « golden age » of the pearl and mother-of-pearl trade. Indeed, from 1880 onwards, pearl trade became rapidly globalized and this globalizing process established the supremacy of the Gulf, which was under British rule since the beginning of the xixth century. The Gulf became the world most famous pearling zone around 1890, after the collapse of two rich and hitherto dominating pearling areas, the Red Sea and Ceylon.Two different kinds of merchant flows used to connect the Gulf to the rest of the world. Some of the pearls were kept for the regional market and were sold to Persia, to the Ottoman Empire, to the west coast of India or to other places in the Indian Ocean. Others were exported to London, Paris, Hambourg or New York. As a consequence of this success, pearl-fishing became a sort of monoactivity in the Gulf. During the pearl-season, i. e. from April to November, a labour force, which came from the Arabian and the Persian side of the Gulf, was employed in pearl- fishing. Indian merchants, who used to controll the entire « pearl process » from fishing to marketing by lending money to the Arab captains of the pearling dhows, had a great influence in the Gulf at that time. For thirty years, because they were attracted by the success of pearls which were used in jewellery or in textile industry, different types of actors tried to settle in the Gulf. The British Archives also refer to powerful German industrialists, for whom this zone of the world had a very special interest. For these entrepreneurs, the Gulf had inherited some of the beauties of the antique ancient Mesopotamia. That is to say, the Gulf was a fertile land which the Bismarckian Germany could conquer in order to build a colonial empire in the Middle East. These German industrialists tried to develop modern techniques of fishing in order to increase the pearl harvest and above all, to compete on a political and economic ground with the British. Facing this « pearl rush » and the gradual process of globalization, the British set up a complex legislation. However, the decisions taken since 1890 display divergent interests because they are at the same time influenced by protectionism and liberalism. In the one hand, the British wanted to protect the local economy against foreign interference and the concurrence of labour force imported for the indian sub-continent and to be favourable to the British companies which were established in the Gulf. On the other hand, because they firmly believed in economic liberalism and in « a laisser-faire » policy, the British wanted the Gulf to remain a free area open to foreign powers. Therefore, it is via a unique maritime legislation, defining some fishing zones reserved for the inhabitants of the Trucial Coast that the British maintained their economic and political primacy in the Gulf.