Jérôme PETIT

Jérôme PETIT

Librarian (BnF)
Manuscripts Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France
Director of Studies (EPHE)
Manuscript cultures of the Indian world

Biography

Jérôme Petit is in charge of the South and South-East Asian collections in the Manuscript Department at the BnF, and runs a research seminar at the EPHE in connection with these collections, exploring the philology, codicology and palaeography of India’s scriptural traditions. Trained in Jaina studies by Nalini Balbir, he first became interested in the digambara mystical tradition influenced by the philosopher Kundakunda (Samayasāra, La quintessence du soi, Payot, 2021) through to the Gujarati Śrīmad Rājacandra (Ātmasiddhi, La réalisation du soi, Payot, 2020), focusing on the figure of Banārasīdās (Ardhakathānaka, Histoire à demi, 2011), a merchant of the first half of the 17th century, leader of the Adhyātma movement. The history of Indian studies, which is partly played out through manuscript collections, is the other subject on which his interest has been focused. Following a collective work on Antoine Léonard Chézy, the first holder of the Sanskrit chair at the Collège de France (Le sanctuaire dévoilé, with Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, 2019), he has traced the history of the BnF’s Indian manuscript collection, using the mission led by Charles d’Ochoa to Maharashtra in 1843 as a basis (La mission de Charles d’Ochoa, EPHE, forthcoming).