Jean Mabillon

Jean Mabillon (born November 23, 1632 in Saint-Pierremont , Champagne province , † December 27, 1707 in Paris ) was a French Benedictine monk , scholar and founder of the auxiliary historical sciences .

Bust of Mabillon in the Church of St. Germain-des-Prés

Life

Jean Mabillon was the son of the farmer Estienne Mabillon († 1692) and his wife Jeanne, b. Guérin was born in a village in the Ardennes . His uncle Jean Mabillon, a parish priest in Neuville-Day , gave the 9-year-old his first class. At the age of 12 he entered the Collège des Bons Enfants in Reims , financially supported by his uncle, and in 1650 the seminary. Three years later he left the seminary and became a monk in the Maurinian Abbey of St. Remi . Ironically, he was initially banned from studying intellectual property because of a headache. In 1658 Mabillon was sent to Corbie , where he worked as a cellar master . 1660 he received in the Cathedral of Amiens , the ordination . In 1663 he came to the Abbey of Saint-Denis as a monastery treasurer and a year later to the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, where he stayed until the end of his life.

In Saint-Germain-des-Prés he became assistant to the librarian Luc d'Achery in 1664 , which marked the beginning of his scholarly career . In the following years Mabillon came into contact with numerous scholars, such as Charles du Fresne, sieur du Cange , Étienne Baluze and Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont .

In this environment, Mabillon devoted himself entirely to editing. In 1667 he published his edition of the works of Bernhard von Clairvaux and in 1668 the lives of the saints of the Benedictine order (Acta sanctorum ordinis Sancti Benedicti 500-1100, 9 vols., 1668-1701). In 1681 the first edition of De re diplomatica libri sex appeared , in which Mabillon scientifically described and classified ancient and medieval writings and documents for the first time. This work is considered to be the foundation of palaeography and diplomacy . It brought him the attention of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and Louis XIV. Mabillon refused the pension that Colbert offered him. He traveled through Europe, to Burgundy (1682), Switzerland and Germany (1683) and Italy (1685) to research archives and to read medieval manuscripts for the royal library, today's Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris acquire.

Jean Mabillon

Armand Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé , abbot of the reformed Abbey of La Trappe, criticized this lifestyle, which was entirely dedicated to historical research . He accused Mabillon of doing mental instead of physical work, contrary to the tradition of Benedictine monasticism. Mabillon replied to him in 1691 with the Traité des études monastiques that science and research are subordinate to the monastic ideal of life, but are very much necessary.

Mabillon's criticism of the veneration of relics of “unknown saints” in the catacombs of Rome under the pseudonym Eusebius Romanus and his controversial commentary on the works of Augustine also caused complaints that culminated in the accusation of Jansenism . However, the church and the king covered the scholar.

1701 Mabillon was appointed one of the founding members of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres . 1703 to 1707 he published the first four volumes of the Annales ordinis Sancti Benedicti 480-1157 (vol. 5 posthumously 1713, vol. 6 by other authors 1739). In 1704 the second edition of De re diplomatica appeared with a supplementary volume .

Mabillon died in 1707 at the age of 75 and was buried in the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, where his tomb can still be found today.

In Paris, the nearby rue Mabillon and since 1925 the Métro station Mabillon bear his name . The historical magazine Revue Mabillon also bears his name.

Fonts

Annales Ordinis Sancti Benedicti , 1739

• Acta Sanctorum Ordinis Sancti Benedicti , tom. 1-6, Paris 1668-1733. On-line
• Oeuvres choisies . Ed. Robert Laffont, Paris 2007. (New edition of the 1953 work edition, added)
• On the study of the monks (Traité des études monastiques). Edited by Cyrill Schäfer. EOS, St. Ottilien 2008, ISBN 978-3-8306-7315-6 .

literature

• Rutherford Aris : Jean Mabillon (1632-1707). In: Helen Damico, Joseph B. Zavadil (eds.): Medieval Scholarship. Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Disciplin. Volume 1: History. (= Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Vol. 1350). Garland Publishing, New York 1995, ISBN 0-8240-6894-7 , pp. 15-32.
• Blandine Barret-Kriegel: Jean Mabillon. Pr. Univ. de France, Paris 1988, ISBN 2-13-041956-9 .
• Arthur Bauckner: Mabillon's journey through Bavaria in 1683. Wild, Munich 1910.
• Maciej Dorna: Mabillon and others. The beginnings of diplomacy , Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2019 (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen; 159), ISBN 978-3-447-11141-6 .
• Georgios Fatouros:  Jean Mabillon. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 5, Bautz, Herzberg 1993, ISBN 3-88309-043-3 , Sp. 511-514.
• Gall Heer: Johannes Mabillon and the Swiss Benedictines. A contribution to the history of historical source research in the 17th and 18th centuries. Leobuchh., St. Gallen 1938.
• Odo Lang: Jean Mabillon, Augustin Calmet, Martin Gerbert in Einsiedeln. Einsiedeln Abbey Library, exhibition, summer 1983. Einsiedeln Abbey Library, 1983, DNB 891504389 .
• Mark Mersiowsky: "Expansion of the discourse zone" around 1700. Barthélémy Germon's attack on Jean Mabillon’s diplomacy. In: Thomas Wallnig, Thomas Stockinger, Ines Peper, Patrick Fiska, [Ed.]: European cultures of history around 1700. Scholarship, politics and denomination. Berlin [u. a.] 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-025918-6 , pp. 447-484, 648-661, DNB 101775361X / 04 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Jean Mabillon in the catalog of the German National Library
• Jean Mabillon: De re diplomatica (1709) - digitized
• Biography with picture