Lettres patentes concernant les Missions Étrangères.

[France, c.1773]. Manuscript in ink, [5] pp., folio; extremely well preserved; bound in modern papered boards with gilt-lettered red leather title label to the front; ex libris label of H. P. Kraus to front pastedown.

One of the most important institutions in the history of evangelisation in Asia, the Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP), or Foreign Missions Society, was founded in 1663 under the authority of Louis XIV as an organisation of secular priests and lay persons dedicated to missionary work in foreign lands. Although early on it had been active in North America, by the late eighteenth-century the MEP’s activities were almost entirely concentrated in Asia. The present document is a fully contemporary manuscript copy written in a clerical hand – whether that of a legal or religious scribe is not clear – of the 1773 Lettres Patentes issued under Louis XV concerning the newly codified regulations, privileges, and formal recognition of the MEP. It comprises a preamble (two-and-a-half pages), followed by 17 articles numbered I-XVII. At the foot of the last page of the document it is indicated that the original was signed by Louis and by Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, Minister of State.