Dolet, Étienne

DOLET, ETIENNE. – Born at Orléans on 3 August 1509, he studied in Paris and Padua. In Toulouse, where he had gone to complete his studies, he was imprisoned for his non-Catholic conduct; upon his release he moved to Lyon, where in 1535 he published his anti-Ciceronian and anti-Erasmian work: Dialogus de imitatione Ciceroniana adversus Desiderium Erasmum Roterodamum pro Christophoro Longolio.

His principal work, of no negligible importance in the history of modern philology, is: Commentariorum linguae Latinae tomus primus (Lyon 1536), followed by a tomus secundus (there 1538); in 1538 he obtained a printer’s licence: from his printing press emerged the boldest works of the period (Rabelais, Marot, various Calvinists); for this reason he had to flee to Piedmont; having returned to France in 1544, he was tried and condemned to be burned at the stake: he suffered the penalty in Paris on 3 August 1546. Violent and sensitive, imprudent and wary, he is among the most enigmatic figures of sixteenth-century France: in a brawl he killed the painter Compaing with dagger blows (Lyon, December 1536), yet he considered himself a champion and defender of the true religion, opposing to the Christianity of the inquisitors the Christ of the justice of the

of charity and peace; some of his contemporaries considered him an atheist (among them Calvin), but in 1535 he vehemently accused Erasmus himself of atheism; he supported the Protestant revolution, but at the same time defined Lutheranism as an impious sect. He wished to place himself above the fray, mocking the folly of the Lutherans who endangered their lives for what he called a ridiculous heading, but he was in all likelihood psychologically abnormal.

Massimo Petrocchi