That there should be an angle of privacy to the recent discovery of a hitherto unknown manuscript of Francois de la Rochefoucauld’s Mémoires at the manuscript collection of St. Catharine’s College Cambridge, is not only mildly surprising but also deliciously interesting. Scandal, social intrigue, slander, war, pirate publishing and an annotator with a talent for drama are the lickerous themes around which issues of privacy in St. Catharine’s College manuscript 17 revolve.

These privacy issues are touched upon in the digitization and manuscript description of MS 17 on Cambridge University Digital Library. When looking at the digitization, it is particularly interesting to note the added title ‘Mémoires Secrets’ to the original title ‘Guerre de Paris’. This addition is particularly visible on folio 1r, where the annotator squeezes the added title in just above the original title. The manuscript collections at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France contain several 17th century copies of Francois de Rochefoucauld’s Mémoires, but none of them have the added title ‘Secrets’. It is not clear why the annotator in MS 17 added the adjective ‘Secrets’ nor even who the annotator was. PhD Fellow at the Centre for Privacy Studies, Anni Haahr Henriksen, is currently working on answering these, and many more, questions in an article on the manuscript and the colourful history of its text.