Du Cange, Charles du Fresne, Sieur de

DU CANGE, CHARLES DU FRESNE, sieur de. - French scholar, b. at Amiens on 18 Dec. 1610, d. at Paris on 23 Oct. 1688. At the age of nine he entered the Jesuit college of Amiens, where he received his first education; he then went on to Orléans to study law. In 1631, having moved to Paris, he joined the ranks of the advocates at the Parliament, but a few years later he returned to Amiens, where in 1638 he married Catherine du Bos, by whom he had ten children. In 1645 he was appointed treasurer of France in his native city, an office already held by his father-in-law, who had died in the same year. In 1668, when a disastrous plague broke out in Amiens, he took refuge with his whole family in Paris, where he remained until his death.

D. C. shares with Mabillon, to whom he was bound by sincere admiration, the glory of being the greatest scholar of his time: his studies extended from philology to history, from linguistics to archaeology, from numismatics to heraldry. Among his very many writings the following should be mentioned: 1) Histoire de l'Empire de Constantinople sous les empereurs françois, Paris 1657. The work consists of two parts: the edition, with translation and scholarly notes, of ancient Frankish texts on the wars against Constantinople, and a historical reconstruction of the events of the East and of Europe in the medieval age. D. C. himself prepared a 2nd ed. of it, which he was unable to bring to light: but J. A. Buchon, in republishing it (Paris 1826), adhered to the author's plan for this unrealized edition. 2) Traité historique du chef de st Jean-Baptiste, ibid. 1665: it is an essay of curious erudition, which likewise reveals the profound and manifold learning of D. C. 3) Histoire de st Louis, roi de France, écrite par Jean, sire de Joinville, published at Paris in 1668 and reprinted in the appendix to the Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis in the edition of 1883: it contains the text of Jean de Joinville, drawn from the manuscripts, and 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, ibid. 1670: a critical edition with a rich apparatus of historical and philological notes. 5) De imperatorum Constantinopolitanorum seu inferioris aevi vel imperii uti vocant numismatibus disertatus, a learned numismatic excursus first published in 1678 in the appendix to the Latin Glossarium and printed separately at Rome in 1755. 6) Historia Byzantina duplici commentario illustrata, Lyon 1680, of vast bulk and profound erudition. 7) Ioannis Zonarae annales ab exordio mundi ad mortem Alexii Comneni, graece et latine, 2 vols., Paris 1688, among the best critical editions with commentary to have appeared in the 17th century. 8) Chronicon Paschale, in the course of printing when D. C. died: it was continued by Baluze, who prefixed to the edition the funeral eulogy of the author (Paris 1689). But the works that above all made the fame of D. C. clear were the Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinitatis and the Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae graecitatis. The first came out at Paris in 1678, in 3 vols.; the following year a new ed. saw the light at Frankfurt am Main; in 1736 the Maurists republished it, enlarging it; in 1766 there was a new ed., in 4 vols., with the supplement of dom Carpentier, later merged with the original part in the successive reprints; between 1840 and 1850, from the press of Didot, another edition was made, the most important after the first, edited by M. Henschel; in 1883 L. Favre published another, enlarged, at Niort, modeled on that of Henschel. Although the horizon of medieval Latin studies has expanded immensely over the course of nearly 3 centuries, and the Glossarium of D. C. proves today in many cases insufficient, no lexicon has ever been able to replace it: the vastness of the documentation, always exactly cited, and drawn from charters and literary texts then for the most part unpublished, the sureness of the approach which for its age has something prodigious about it (the having sought the forms of medieval Latin in notarial documents, rather than in doctrinal treatises or in books of literature, greatly anticipates the modern conception of language understood as a living element in evolution) make it still today a most highly appreciated working tool, 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 published for the first time at Lyon in 1683 in 2 vols., and had several reprints (the last, anastatic, is from 1944): it did not enjoy the same resonance as the Latin one, although it constituted the first impulse to the study of the Byzantine language and civilization, but it too has remained, to this day, irreplaceable.

Besides 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 large part in recovering. They are divided into three groups: one, the richest, pertaining to the history of France, consisting of a substantial body of monographic essays, of studies on historical questions and periods, intended to serve for a general history of France; the second relating to the history of Picardy; the third miscellaneous, containing dissertations on the most varied subjects. Among the posthumous works worthy of mention are 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, published at Paris in 1869; and the Glossaire français, a dictionary of Old French printed as an appendix to the Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis in the ed. of Niort 1879.

Niort 1883; M. Esposito, s.v. in DACL. IV (1921), coll. 1654-60.

Alessandro Pratesi