Guillaume Budé

Guillaume Budé (b. 1467–d. 1540) is one of the most relevant French contemporaries of Erasmus, and a friend of his. As a scholar, Budé improved several fields of research, such as studies on Roman law and Ancient Greek lexicography. A high civil servant and not a professor, Guillaume Budé is also credited with the creation of the first chairs (1530) of Collège de France. Budé received a traditional education in law before starting humanistic studies around 1491 and entering the circle of intellectuals gathered by Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. He then learned Ancient Greek and became one of the first modern Frenchmen to master this language to a level comparable to that of contemporary Italians. Not only did he start as a humanist by publishing some short translations from Greek into Latin (1505–1506), but he culminated his career with the Commentaries on the Greek Tongue in 1529, his most celebrated work (Commentarii Graecae linguae; posthumous, revised edition,1548). Between these two achievements, Budé ensured considerable results with other massive scholarly works. He first studied in a new way—which will later be called the Mos Gallicus Jura docendi—the texts of Corpus Juris, combining Greek and Latin philology, encyclopedic and legal knowledge, theoretical skills in his 1508 Annotations on the Digest (Annotationes in XXIV Pandectarum libros, followed by Annotationes reliquae in Pandectas in 1526). He then uncovered a vast portion of Antiquity, and resolved some textual enigmas, with The Roman As and Its Fractions (De Asse and Partibus eius Libri V, 1515, followed by six revised editions), a five-book tentacular monograph often simply called De Asse. It focuses on the vocabulary of quantities, their literary expressions, in words and abbreviations, and the resulting textual corruption or misunderstanding, thus allowing a more precise interpretation of Greek and Latin classics in general. Besides his international correspondence, Budé’s production includes moral essays and exhortations to humanistic studies. It ends in 1535 with From Hellenism to Christianism (De Transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum), a meditation on the importance of religious devotion for a learned man, and a political answer to the Affaire des Placards, an anti-Catholic scandal that occurred in 1534 and endangered the Parisian and French humanist current. While 19th- and early 20th-century scholarship has rediscovered Budé’s original contribution to European humanism, recent research has focused on his literary production and his philological achievements.

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