Louis Picques

Louis Picques (* 1637 in Paris ; † May 9, 1699 ibid) was a French Catholic priest, doctor of theology , orientalist and librarian .

Picques, 1688–1695 director of the library of the Collège des Quatre Nations in Paris, was famous among contemporaries for his broad knowledge of oriental languages : “pour estre son amy, il falloit sçavoir le copte, l'égyptien ou le samaritain, ou du moins parler l'arabe ”(Gilles Ménage, 1613–1692). In learned circles at home and abroad he was valued as a conversation partner and correspondent.

Picque's scientific achievement consisted primarily of collecting, reading, annotating, discussing and corresponding. On the other hand, he was not a man of book writing. He hardly brought anything to print. Only Eusèbe Renaudot was able to realize his plan for a multilingual collection of Christian liturgies, incomplete due to circumstances, because, apart from Greek, due to the lack of print types without the Christian-Oriental original texts.

Picques bequeathed his stately private library, including valuable oriental manuscripts, to the Jacobin monastery on rue Saint-Honoré . The prints, e.g. Some of them are richly provided with scholarly annotations and are now part of the Bibliothèque Mazarine . The Bibliothèque nationale de France keeps the manuscripts .

literature

• Francis Richard: Louis Picques, "Doctor of the Maison et Société de Sorbonne": les annotations d'un théorien féru de langues orientales. In: Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France. 2. 1999 42-46 u. pl. IV.