Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont

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Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont in a contemporary engraving by Charles Simonneau after a portrait by Claude Lefebvre .

Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (born November 30, 1637 in Paris , † January 10, 1698 ) was a French historian .

Tillemont was raised as a member of a wealthy Jansenist family at the Petites écoles in Port-Royal-des-Champs . This is where his historical interest was shaped and promoted. At the age of 20 he began work on his two monumental works, the Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire ecclésiastique des six premiers siècles (a church history of the first six centuries) and the Histoire des empereurs et autres princes qui ont régné pendant les six premiers siècles de l'Église (a history of the Roman emperors).

Tillemont was ordained a priest at the age of 39. He settled in Port-Royal until it was dissolved a few years later, in 1679. He spent the rest of his life working on the family estate in Tillemont. The Histoire was published from 1690, the Mémoires from 1693. Both publications were not completed by his death. This work was among the first to provide a critical review of all source material. His style is dry but accurate and detailed, but his work has also been attacked, e.g. B. von Honoratus a Sancta Maria (1651–1729) in his Réflexions sur les règles et l'usage de la critique (3 volumes, 1712–1720)

Tillemont is often quoted by Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire .

Works

  • Vie de Saint Louis roi de France . 1688.
  • Histoire des empereurs et autres princes qui ont régné durant les six premiers siècles de l'Histoire . 1691.
  • Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire ecclésiastique des six premiers siècles, justifiés par les citations des auteurs originaux avec une chronologie où l'on fait un abrégé de l'histoire ecclésiastique et avec des notes pour éclaircir les difficultés des faits et de la la chronologie . 1693.

literature

  • Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont . In: Catholic Encyclopedia . Robert Appleton Company, New York 1913.
  • Guy Bourdé, Hervé Martin: Les écoles historiques . Point-Seuil Histoire, 1993 (1997 new edition), p. 134.
  • Andreas Urs Sommer : Creation of meaning through history? On the emergence of a speculative-universalistic philosophy of history between Bayle and Kant. Schwabe, Basel 2006 ( ISBN 3-7965-2214-9 ), pp. 77-86 (detailed on the historical-theological model in Le Nain de Tillemont).

Footnotes

  1. ^ Honoratus a Sancta Maria in: Catholic Encyclopedia, 1913

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Le Nain de Tillemont, Louis-Sébastien
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 30, 1637
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH January 10, 1698