Gilles Ménage

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Gilles Ménage ( Aegidius Menagius , born August 15, 1613 in Angers , † July 23, 1692 in Paris ) was a French writer and philologist .

Gilles Ménage (attributed to); 1666

Life

Ménage came from a family of lawyers and studied law to become a lawyer like his father and grandfather (who had also worked as a legal writer). Although he was admitted to the parlement of Paris, he gave up law before he had even begun, apparently for health reasons. He was given the minor orders and received the benefice of a commendate abbot in Montdidier ( Picardy ), which secured him a certain income, but did not require a local presence, so that he, as l'Abbé Ménage, as he was now called, his literary and could pursue philological interests.

For a few years he was close to Jean-François Paul de Gondi , the bustling coadjutor and designated successor to the Archbishop of Paris and future Cardinal de Retz. Here he found the opportunity to weave a network of relationships in intellectually interested Parisian circles. So he frequented the drawing room of the novelist Madeleine de Scudéry , where he a. a. met the young Marquise de Sévigné and found a docile student in the form of the adolescent Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, who later became the novelist Madame de La Fayette .

After 1648 he fell out with his patron Gondi and moved to the canon of Notre-Dame de Paris . Here he held a literary salon , which he called Mercuriales (= the wednesday), because Wednesday (Latin dies Mercurii ) was the jour fixe of the meetings. Here u. a. the writers Jean Chapelain , Paul Pellisson , Valentin Conrart and Jean François Sarrazin .

Ménage wrote in French, Italian, and Latin. A constant theme of his poems ( madrigals , eclogues , epistles , epigrams ) was the veneration of women. The spread of the bouts-rimés in the salons, which, like other fashion literature, are included in the area of preciosity , is said to go back to his work .

He was a member of the scholars and writers' association of the Florentine Accademia della Crusca . His works Le origini della lingua italiana (1685) and Dictionnaire étymologique ou Origines de la langue françoise (1694) were later important sources for the founder of Romance linguistics , Friedrich Diez .

Because of his pugnacious character, he had numerous opponents, e. B. the philologist Claude Favre de Vaugelas , against whom he polemicized in his Observations sur la langue française about the correct use of language. Molière took him as a model for the figure of the pedantic scholar Vadius in Les femmes savantes (1672). Ménage was also ridiculed by Nicolas Boileau in the Satires .

His thoughts and bon mots were published in 1693 in a posthumous compilation, the Menagiana .

Works

  • Poemata latina, gallica, graeca, et italica (1656)
  • Origini della lingua italiana (1669)
  • Dictionnaire étymologique (1650 and 1670)
  • Observations sur la langue française (1672–1676)
  • Histoire de Sablé (1683)
  • Anti-Bailet (1690)
  • Historia mulierum philosopharum (1690; French. Histoire des femmes philosophes . Paris 2003; German. History of women philosophers . Edited by Christian Kaiser and Sandra Plastina Ricklin. Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-7873-3447-6 )
  • Menagiana (1693)

Remarks

  1. ^ Membership catalog of the Crusca
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Sykorra : Friedrich Diez´Etymological Dictionary of Romance Languages ​​and its Sources. Romance studies and preparatory work 47. Bonn: University Romance Studies, 1973

literature

  • Isabelle Leroy-Turcan: Introduction à l'étude du "Dictionnaire étymologique ou Origines de la langue francoise" by Gilles Ménage (1694). Lyon: Center d'Etudes linguistiques Jacques Goudet 1991.
  • Wendy Ayres-Bennett: Dangers and Difficulties in Linguistic Historiography: The Case of Gilles Ménage (1613-1692), in: Werner Hüllen (Ed.), Understanding the Historiography of Linguistics. Problems and Projects. Symposium at Essen, November 23-25, 1989 . Münster: Nodus Publications 1990, pp. 195–206.
  • Elvire Samfiresco: Ménage. Polémiste, philologue, poète. Genève: Slatkine repr. 1971.
  • Joseph Zehnder: Les Origini della lingua italiana de Gilles Ménage. Etude historique et critique. Thèse Lett. Friborg / Suisse. Paris: J. Flory 1939.

Web links


personal data
SURNAME Ménage, Gilles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author and linguist
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1613
PLACE OF BIRTH Angers
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 1692
Place of death Paris