BUDÉ, GUILLAUME. - French scholar, b. in Paris on 26 Jan. 1468 and d. there on 22 Aug. 1540, considered the first humanist of France. After having pursued legal studies in Paris and in Orléans, with scant profit, contact with the Greek Hermonymos and with Lascaris opened up to him a broader sphere of cultural interests, and he devoted himself with love to classical antiquity, especially Greek. He held various offices from the court (secretary to Louis XII, ambassador to Rome for the coronation of Pope Julius II and to Pope Leo X, traveling companion of Francis I, etc.) and was in contact with the most illustrious scholars of the time (besides Lascaris, T. More, Erasmus of Rotterdam, P. Bembo, N. Bérauld, G. Sadoleto, Rabelais, etc.). In 1530 he obtained from Francis I the founding of the "Collegium trilingue" (Hebrew, Greek and Latin), which later became the Collège de France; he also founded the Library of Fontainebleau, which, later transferred to Paris, subsequently formed the first nucleus of the National Library. Today the Association G. B. is named after him, under whose auspices there is published, among other things, one of the richest and most valuable collections of Greek and Latin texts, known, from the name of the publishing house, as the "Les Belles Lettres series."
Between 1502 and 1505 he published the Latin translation of several treatises of Plutarch, an author whom the humanists especially favored. To 1508 belong his Adnotationes in XXIV libros Pandectarum, issued in Paris in a large folio volume, which, by introducing for the first time historical and philological considerations into the study of Roman law, opened new paths for this kind of inquiry and in a certain way foreshadowed Cujas. Six years later B. inaugurated the study of metrology, with the fundamental Libri V de Asse et partibus eius (folio, Paris 1514; published anew, in a greatly improved form, in Venice in 1522; Italian translation by Gualandi, Florence 1562; a summary, prepared by B. himself at the request of Francis I, was published in Paris in 1522 under the title Summaire ou Epitome du livre de Asse). After a philosophical-moral treatise, in which the author reveals a religious spirit based on sentiment rather than on theological speculation (De contemptu rerum fortuitarum libri tres, Paris 1521-26), B. reveals himself once again as a humanist and Hellenist among the best with the De studio litterarum recte et commode instituendo (ibid. 1527); with the Commentarii linguae grecae (folio, ibid. 1529; 2nd improved ed., published posthumously, ibid. 1548), a very rich collection of lexicography, to which all the authors of Greek lexicons who came after him have drawn extensively; with the De philologia (ibid. 1530), an interesting treatise in dialogue form (a chapter was translated into French by L. Le Roy, at the behest of Charles IX, in 1572, and published in Paris in 1861, under the title Traité de la vénerie). The passion of the philologist and the ardor of the Christian dictated the pages of the De transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum libri tres (Paris 1534), where B. sets forth the principle that pagan culture neither excludes nor stifles the faith, to which rather man attains by rising from that culture. There also remains from him a collection of Epistolae (ibid. 1520-31), which however includes only a small part (160 letters) of his copious correspondence, and a posthumous writing, De l'institution du prince (folio, ibid. 1547), which is a reworking of his Recueil d'apophthegnes, offered to Francis I, a manuscript in the library of the Arsenal of Paris (ms. 5103). The Opera omnia was published in 4 large folio volumes at Basel in 1557.
The conciliatory attitude shown toward the Reformation, the circumstance that in his will he refused any funeral honors, the passage of his widow, Roberta Le Lyeur, to the Lutheran creed nine years after his death, have led to the supposition that B. adhered to Protestantism in the last years of his life (E. Haag devotes an entry to him in the dictionary of French Protestants, La France protestante, III, Paris 1852, p. 74 ff.). But, apart from the reprobation of the corrupt morals of the clergy, there are no other elements to support this hypothesis, refuted moreover in the biography traced by one of his descendants (E. de
Budé, Vie de G. B., fondateur du Collège de France, Paris 1884).
Bibliography8 works
Alessandro Pratesi