Jacques Amyot

Jacques Amyot

Jacques Amyot (born October 29, 1513 in Melun , † February 6, 1593 in Auxerre ) was a French cleric , humanist and writer and from 1560 Bishop of Auxerre . With his widely read translations of Greek works, he had a major influence on the development of French literature.

Life

Amyot came from a humble background, but was able to get a theological and above all a good humanistic education in Paris . Like many humanists of those years, he too sympathized with the Reformation and in 1534, when its oppression began in France, briefly got into trouble. Around 1536 he was for some time a lecturer (a kind of private lecturer) in Greek at the University of Bourges before he became tutor to the children of a royal secretary who dabbled as a Euripides translator in 1540 . Through him he got in contact with King Francis I , who commissioned him in 1542 with a transfer of Plutarch's "parallel biographies" of famous Greeks and Romans, written around 110 AD, and who, shortly before his death in 1547, assigned him a lucrative church loan.

Jacques Amyot's birthplace in Melun

The first transmission that Amyot had published, however, was that of the Ethiopica of Heliodorus (3rd century AD), the adventurous story of Theagenes and the beautiful Chariklea in 1548 . The anonymously published book (because romance novels were not appropriate for a clergyman) was widely read and imitated in France, and not only here, and was still parodied by Voltaire in Candide in 1758 .

Between 1548 and 1552 Amyot made several long trips to Venice and Rome to look at manuscripts by Greek authors. In 1554 he brought out a translation of seven books of the monumental universal history of Diodorus of Sicily († approx. 30 BC).

In 1557 he was appointed tutor of their sons Karl and Heinrich by King Heinrich II and his wife Katharina von Medici . After the former in 1560 as Charles IX. Had come to the throne very young, Amyot was promoted to "Grand aumônier de France" ( Grand Almosier of France ).

Shortly before (1559) he had published what is considered to be his most important translation: Les vies des hommes illustres grecs et romains, comparées l'une avec l'autre par Plutarque , a pair of 46 historical figures (e.g. Alexander and Caesar ) linking biographical collection. The text, which is very freely translated for today's terms, was evidently well adapted to the expectations of French readers and immediately became a great book success. While Amyot was still alive, numerous reprints and four new editions revised by him appeared. The Plutarque was reprinted again and again in the following centuries , it was compulsory reading for all educated people and an important source of material for novelists and playwrights.

Also in 1559, Amyot published, again anonymously, a transmission of Longos ' idyllic little romance novel about the young shepherds Daphnis and Chloe (around 200 AD), which helped establish shepherd literature in France at the time.

In 1572 he brought out a transfer of mixed moral-philosophical writings by Plutarch under the title Œuvres morales . It was also a great success. B. admired by Montaigne and influenced the subsequent French essay writing and moral studies .

A short time earlier, in 1570, Amyot had been appointed Bishop of Auxerre . In this role he developed into an energetic advocate of a Catholic-oriented state centralism in France, which in his opinion was the only remedy against the Huguenot wars between Protestants and Catholics, which began in 1562 and which he did not live to see at the end of 1598.

Web links

Commons : Jacques Amyot  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Gert Pinkernell: names, titles and dates of the French Literature (main source of the article)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY - VOLUME III - THE WARS OF RELIGION CHAPTER II. FRENCH HUMANISM AND MONTAIGNE ( Memento from April 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive )

predecessor	Office	successor
Philibert Babou de La Bourdaisière	Bishop of Auxerre 1570–1593	François de Donadieu