Untitled - Monoskop

RANGE OF INTERESTS: ANALYSIS BY SUBJECT
sermons usually armed himself with a privilege, and reprints soon after
the expiry of the privilege bear witness to the prudence of this measure.
Among the privileges in this category
the most numerous are those
obtained, both before and after his death in 1515, for the sermons of Jean
Raulin, the monastic reformer, well known in Paris (having been head of the
College de Navarre), and greatly respected. These included Raulin's sermons
for Lent (CH 1512, i (i)), on Penance, under the title Itinerarium Paradisi
(CP 1514, 3), for Advent, on Death, on the Eucharist (CH 1515, 5 (2, 3 and
6)), and on Saints' Days (PA 1524, 8), not to mention his letters (CH 1520, 5
(i)). Guillaume Pepin, from the Dominican priory of Evreux, was a par-
ticularly popular preacher in Paris: his sermons published under privilege
included those for the Gospels and Epistles on Sundays and those on the
Confiteor (PA 1519, 4 (4 and 5)), and those on the Destruction ofNiniveh by
Niniveh meaning Vice (CP 1525, 4). Among other sermon collections to
receive privilege were those preached in Lent by Jean Cleree (CP 1520, 18),
Michel Menot (PA 1525, 3) and Robert Messier (PA 1525, i), and in Lent
and in Advent by Boniface de Ceva (PA 1517, i and PA 1518, 6); on the
Psalms by Armand de Bellevue (PA 1519, 4 (i)); for the Sundays of the winter
and of the summer months, and by the Spanish Dominican Sancho de Porta
(CP 1513, 3 and 4); the sermons of Pierre Richard of Coutances (CP 1518,
3A); and the sermons of Bertrand de La Tour or De Turre edited by Pierre de
Neufve, Principal of the College de Dainville (PA 1521, 7).
If some of the doctors of theology in the Paris Faculty were thus active in
preaching and provided their publishers with very saleable books in so doing,
others cultivated the field of ecclesiastical history and unearthed or edited
texts which also were of interest to a large educated public. Guillaume Petit,
or Parvi, bishop of Troyes, Inquisitor General in France, confessor to
Louis XII and Francis I and, under the latter, librarian of the royal collection
of Blois, used his great position and the funds put at his disposal to seek out
manuscripts of value from the past which were hitherto unpublished and to
arrange for them to be edited and printed. He was also well placed to facilitate
the grant of a privilege where this was appropriate (e.g. CH 1519, 6). A
somewhat younger theologian who shared his interests and was inspired by
him, Jacques Merlin, had originally come to Paris to study philosophy under
Pierre Tartaret, but branched out into the study of the early church, of the
Fathers and of the classics of medieval piety. He edited Origen: not in Greek, 1
to which the resources of French scholarship and French printing were
unequal at so early a date, but in reputable Latin translations, some by
Origen's opponent StJerome. He included Origen's Contra Celsum (enumerating
and answering a Jewish attack on the divinity of Christ) in the version of
the Italian humanist Cristoforo Persona. He added an Apologia of his own for
1 The
Greek text was first edited by Erasmus with a Latin translation of his own (Basle, Froben,
1536).
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