Budé, Guillaume

Abstract

Guillaume Budé’s manifold humanistic production represents a puzzling challenge in today’s specialized scholarship and makes it difficult to encompass all its aspects. A higher civil servant at the French Court, Budé never held teaching appointments, but showed in his books how French university teaching should be renewed through the study of the humanities. He is considered to have been the founder of Collège de France, whose first lectures were given in 1530. Budé became King Francis I’s counsellor and thus helped Parisian humanism to develop. His production was wide ranging, including a philological study of Justinian’s Digest ushering in the Mos Gallicus iuris docendi (a new historical approach to Roman law), an outstanding monograph on economics in Antiquity, moral essays, and a large Greek prose thesaurus anticipating that of Henri Estienne. Budé also published some translations from Greek and a selection of his own letters, written in Greek and Latin. His extensive knowledge was based on a large personal library, which is still known only partially. From a religious point of view, Budé defended in his De Transitu hellenismi ad Christianismum a sort of Gallican version of Catholicism against, on the one hand, the growing French Lutheran movement and, on the other, the conservative Sorbonne theologians hostile to the humanistic renewal of the University of Paris.