BOUCHIER (BOUCHER), GILLES. - Learned Jesuit, born at Arras on 19 October 1576, died at Tournai on 8 March 1665. Having entered the Society of Jesus in 1598, he was a superior and a renowned orator.
In the Disputatio historica de primis Tungrorum seu Leodiensium episcopis, included with other works in vol. I of the Qui gesta pontificum Tungrensium... scripserunt by G. Chapeauville (Liège 1612), he maintained that Maastricht had never been a bishopric, a controversy that lasted a century. He was the first to establish with certainty the chronology of the Merovingians in the Annotatio de chronologia regum Francorum Merovendarum (op. cit., II, ibid. 1613). He was also the first to publish the Liberian Catalogue, which was therefore also called the anonymous Bucherian, and the greater part of the Chronograph of 354 (De doctrina temporum, commentarius in Vietorium Aquitanum... aliosque antiquae canonum paschalium scriptores [Antwerp 1636], pp. 236-88 [cf. now the critical edition by Th. Mommsen, in MGH, Chronica Minora, I, pp. 39-148]; other parts of the work in PG 10, 209-32; 885-902). He also wrote: Belgium Romanum ecclesiasticum et civile (Liège 1655), while vol. II, Belgium Gallicum (from 511 to Charles the Bald), remained in manuscript, as did a commentary on Gregory of Tours for which he was preparing an edition.