The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University presents the first of a series of international exhibitions celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec by Samuel de Champlain. On view in Providence through Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008, Hostile Intimacy: A Century and a Half of Conflict between New France and New England will also travel to Boston and Quebec this year. It is free and open to the public.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The John Carter Brown Library (JCB) at Brown University presents Hostile Intimacy: A Century and a Half of Conflict between New France and New England, the first in a series of international exhibitions commemorating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain. The exhibition is on through Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008, in the MacMillan Reading Room. It is free and open to the public.

Des Sauvages
The depiction of two Montaignais is a detail from a map in Samuel de Champlain’s 1613 work, Les voyages du sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois ... The JCB Library has made a facsimile of the map available for sale.
Image: John Carter Brown Library

The JCB is home to one of the world’s great collections of Champlain manuscripts, books and maps. Curated by Susan Danforth, Hostile Intimacy presents rare images, books, letters, and other documents that highlight the wary coexistence of Protestant New England and Catholic New France during the first centuries of their shared and often antagonistic history. Some of the rarest books in the JCB collection are on display, including the manuscript of Champlain’s first travel account, the Bref Discours, and Des Sauvages, his first published book.

This exhibition series is supported by a grant from the Gould Foundation. From Providence, the exhibition will move to Boston, where it will open at the Boston Public Library on Thursday, March 13, 2008. The collection will be expanded with additional artifacts from Canadian archives, never before shown in the United States, and one of the most important documents in the history of exploration, the manuscript of Verrazano’s 1524 account of the first European voyage to New England, on loan from the Morgan Library in New York. Finally, the third stage of the series will be in Quebec in June and July of 2008, where the 400th anniversary of the founding of that city will be celebrated simultaneously.

In honor of this exhibition, the JCB will make available the publication of a new facsimile map, New France, 1613, Landmark map of Acadia. The map is taken from Samuel de Champlain, Les voyages du sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois ... (Paris, 1613). It is 17 by 30.5 inches, in black and white. The cost is $15 plus shipping and handling (order #M-083). For more information, call (401) 863-2725.

An Old World-New World Alliance
In a 1609 battle, the Iroquois defend a small wooden fort against Hurons, Algonquians, Montaignais, and three Frenchmen with guns. The central figure is thought to be Champlain, singlehandedly holding off the Iroquois.
Image: John Carter Brown Library

The John Carter Brown Library is a private, nonprofit, independently funded and administered institution for advanced research in history and the humanities, founded in 1846 and located at Brown University since 1901. The library holds one of the world’s leading collections of books, maps and manuscripts relating to the colonial period of the Americas from 1492 to about 1825. The library offers fellowships, sponsors lectures and conferences, regularly mounts exhibitions for the public, and publishes catalogs, bibliographies, facsimiles and other works that interpret its holdings.

The library is located on The College Green at Brown University, corner of George and Brown streets, Providence, R.I. Exhibition hours are Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to noon. For additional information, visit www.jcbl.org.

Editors: Brown University has a fiber link television studio available for domestic and international live and taped interviews, and maintains an ISDN line for radio interviews. For more information, call (401) 863-2476.

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