Les Noces de philologie et de Guillaume Budé: un humaniste et son œuvre à la Renaissance. Études réunies par Christine Bénévent, Romain Menini et Luigi-Alberto Sanchi

Abstract

The Renaissance humanist Guillaume Budé (1468 n.s. –1540) holds an important though uncomfortable place in contemporary French culture. Immediately evoking for many two of the fundamental institutions of the humanities in France today — the Collection Budé (the French equivalent of the Loeb Classical Library) and the Collège de France (in front of which his statue has stood since 1882) — the name Budé also evokes a vague spectre of monstrous erudition, looming out at us from the mists of early modernity. The greatest Budé scholar of the twentieth century, Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie, formulated the bold paradox that this famous name remains that of an unknown (cited p. 7). Such obscurity seems the inevitable fate of an author whose prolific corpus was extremely influential and almost exclusively in Latin; on the map of French letters, therefore, ‘Budé’ remains for many a massy yet unapproachable terra incognita. Keenly aware of this complex inheritance, and eager to provide access to this important author, the contributors to the present volume elucidate the historical Budé through the analysis and exposition of his social context (Part One), methods (Part Two), major works (Part Three), and early modern reception (Part Four). The result is an invaluable work for early modernists interested in this multifaceted humanist. Budé is here viewed from all angles: as a courtier to François Ier; a pioneer in the fields of Renaissance jurisprudence and textual criticism; and as the author of highly original contributions to early modern Christian thought. The keyword for Budé’s significance to us today, and around which the twenty-seven contributions to this collection constantly circle, is of course ‘philology’, a word which simultaneously expresses the focus of Budé’s works and the intellectual method or approach which he pioneered. The name Budé evokes philology in a way very similar to the intimate relationship between Montaigne and the essay, standing for a form of simultaneous writing and reading inextricably intertwined, at the same time highly personal and yet also profoundly influential. Understood therefore as an ‘art de lire’ (p. 9) rather than a scholarly discipline, Budéan philologia is marked by a tension between the reader in the present and the text as a message from the past. This approach promotes reading as a never-ending negotiation between past and present, characterized by ongoing attempts to accommodate the ancient text in the world of the present and the modern reader in that of the past. The intended goal of such reading — for Budé at least — was the eventual transformation of the present through its encounter with the past. Whether or not we still believe in the transformative potential of ancient texts, we remain today just as challenged by the fundamental problem of how to read texts unavoidably tinted by their status as historical artefacts. This volume meets that challenge in a suitably Budéan manner. It delivers an intimate, multifaceted portrait of Budé squarely within his historical moment; moreover, it offers a path to finally integrating the neo-Latin humanist within a longer narrative of French culture.