DU CANGE, CHARLES DU FRESNE, sieur de. — French scholar, born at Amiens on 18 December 1610, died in Paris on 23 October 1688. At the age of nine he entered the Jesuit college of Amiens, where he received his primary education; he then went to Orléans to study law. In 1631, having moved to Paris, he joined the ranks of the advocates at the Parlement, but a few years later returned to Amiens, where in 1638 he married Caterina du Bos, by whom he had ten children. In 1645 he was appointed treasurer of France in his native city, an office previously held by his father-in-law, who died that same year. In 1668, when a disastrous epidemic broke out in Amiens, he took refuge with his entire family in Paris, where he remained until his death.
D. C. shares with Mabillon, to whom he was bound by sincere admiration, the distinction of being the greatest scholar of his age: his studies extended from philology to history, from linguistics to archaeology, and from numismatics to heraldry. Among his very numerous writings, the following should be recalled: 1) Histoire de l'Empire de Constantinople sous les empereurs françois, Paris 1657. The work consists of two parts: an edition, with translation and learned notes, of ancient Frankish texts concerning the wars against Constantinople, and a historical reconstruction of events in the East and in Europe during the medieval period. D. C. himself prepared a 2nd ed., which he was unable to publish; but J. A. Buchon, when republishing it (Paris 1826), followed the author’s plan for this unrealized edition. 2) Traité historique du chef de st Jean-Baptiste, there 1665: a work of curious erudition, which likewise reveals D. C.’s profound and multifaceted learning. 3) Histoire de st Louis, roi de France, écrite par Jean, sire de Joinville, published in Paris in 1668 and reprinted as an appendix to the Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis in the 1883 edition: it contains the text of Jean de Joinville, drawn from the manuscripts, together with a considerable number of historical and critical observations. 4) Ioannis Cinnami historiarum de rebus gestis a Ioanne et Manuele Comnenis libri sex, graece et latine, there 1670: a critical edition with a rich apparatus of historical and philological notes. 5) De imperatorum Constantinopolitanorum seu inferioris acci vel imperii uti vocant numismatibus disertatus, a learned excursus on numismatics first published in 1678 as an appendix to the Latin Glossarium and printed separately in Rome in 1755. 6) Historia Byzantina duplici commentario illustrata, Lyon 1680, an extensive work of profound erudition. 7) Ioannis Zonarae annales ab exordio mundi ad mortem Alexii Comneni, graece et latine, 2 vols., Paris 1688, among the finest critical editions with commentary to have appeared in the 17th century. 8) Chronicon Paschale, in the process of being printed when D. C. died: it was continued by Baluze, who prefaced the edition with a funeral eulogy of the author (Paris 1689). But the works that chiefly established D. C.’s fame were the Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinitatis and the Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae graecitatis. The former appeared in Paris in 1678, in 3 vols.; the following year a new ed. was published at Frankfurt am Main; in 1736 the Maurists republished it in an expanded form; in 1766 a new ed. appeared, in 4 vols., with the supplement by dom Carpentier, later merged with the original section in subsequent reprints; between 1840 and 1850, printed by Didot, another edition was produced, the most important after the first, under the direction of M. Henschel; in 1883 L. Favre published another, expanded edition at Niort, based on Henschel’s. Despite the fact that the scope of medieval Latin studies has expanded immensely over the course of nearly three centuries, and that D. C.’s Glossarium is today inadequate in many cases, no lexicon has ever been able to replace it: the breadth of its documentation, always precisely cited and drawn from documents and literary texts that were then for the most part unpublished, and the soundness of its method, prodigious for its time (his having sought the forms of medieval Latin in notarial documents rather than in doctrinal treatises or works of literature greatly anticipated the modern conception of language as a living element undergoing evolution), still make it a highly valued working instrument, as Mabillon defined it in the preface to the De re diplomatica (Paris 1681): «Amplissimus liber, omnibus apertus, de omnibus agens, ex quo quantum profecerim malo alios quam te iudicare». The Greek Glossarium was first published at Lyon in 1683 in 2 vols., and underwent several reprints (the latest, anastatic, dates from 1944): it did not enjoy the same renown as the Latin one, although it provided the first impetus for the study of Byzantine language and civilization; nevertheless, it too has remained, to this day, irreplaceable.
In addition to the published works, D. C. left a considerable number of manuscript works, which were variously dispersed after the death of his children, but which the French government succeeded in recovering for the most part. They are divided into three groups: one, the richest, relating to the history of France, consisting of a substantial body of monographic essays and studies on historical questions and periods, intended to serve as material for a general history of France; the second concerning the history of Picardy; the third miscellaneous, containing dissertations on subjects of great variety. Among the posthumous works, mention should be made of Les familles d'outre mer, left unfinished by D. C., continued by decree of the Minister of Public Instruction (1854) by N. R. Taranne and, after his death, by E. G. Rey, and published in Paris in 1869; and the Glossaire français, a dictionary of Romance French printed as an appendix to the Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis in the Niort 1879 ed.