“Plus que assez”: Simon Bourgouyn and His French Translations from Plutarch, Petrarch, and Lucian

Abstract

“‘Plus que assez’: Simon Bourgouyn and His French Translations from Plutarch, Petrarch, and Lucian.” Although more or less entirely ignored by modern scholarship Simon Bourgouyn (d. post 1532) was the first known translator of Petrarch’s Triumphs into French verse and very likely the first to render Plutarch’s Lives into French. He also translated Lucianus Samosatensis and is thus a major figure in the introduction of humanist texts into vernacular culture in France. “Plus que Assez” represents the first detailed study of his life and works. Both printed books and manuscripts are examined, and the complex relationships between the surviving manuscripts of his translations, in terms both of text and image, are described. The biographical details which emerge from his own writings and other documents are used to construct a framework for a literary career which took him from the world of Antoine Vérard’s Parisian publishing house to the court of Francis I. There are three appendices: one giving a description of surviving manuscripts, one providing transcriptions of incipits and explicits of Plutarchian Lives, and one outlining the changing role of the gens de métier in Francis I’s reign.