DU CANGE, CHARLES DU FRESNE, sieur de. — French scholar, b. at Amiens on 18 Dec. 1610, d. in Paris on 23 Oct. 1688. At the age of nine he entered the Jesuit college at Amiens, where he received his early education; he then went to Orléans to study law. In 1631, having moved to Paris, he became a member of the bar at the Parlement, 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 at Amiens, he took refuge with his entire family in Paris, where he remained until his death.
Du Cange shares with Mabillon, to whom he was bound by sincere admiration, the glory of being the greatest scholar of his time: his studies ranged from philology to history, from linguistics to archaeology, from numismatics to heraldry. Among his many writings the following deserve special mention: 1) *Histoire de l’Empire de Constantinople sous les empereurs françois*, Paris 1657. The work consists of two parts: the edition, with translation and learned notes, of ancient Frankish texts on the wars against Constantinople, and a historical reconstruction of the events of the East and Europe in the Middle Ages. Du Cange himself prepared a second edition, which he was unable to publish; but J. A. Buchon, in reissuing it (Paris 1826), adhered to the author’s plan for this unpublished edition. 2) *Traité historique du chef de st Jean-Baptiste*, ibid. 1665: a learned essay of curious erudition, which likewise reveals the profound and manifold learning of Du Cange. 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 manuscripts, together with a considerable number of historical and critical observations. 4) *Ioannis Cimani historiarum de rebus gestis a Ioanne et Manuele Commerii 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 nili vocant numismatibus dissertatio*, learned excursus on numismatics first published in 1678 as an appendix to the *Glossarium latino* and issued separately in Rome in 1755. 6) *Historia Byzantina duplici commentario illustrata*, Lyons 1680, a work of vast scope and profound erudition. 7) *Ioannis Zonarae annales ab exordio mundi ad mortem Alexii Comneni, graece et latine*, 2 vols., Paris 1686, one of the best critical editions with commentary to appear in the 17th century. 8) *Chronicon Paschale*, which was in the press when Du Cange died; it was completed by Baluze, who prefixed to the edition a funeral oration for the author (Paris 1689).
But the works that most clearly established Du Cange’s fame were the *Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinitatis* and the *Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae graecitatis*. The first appeared in Paris in 1678 in 3 vols.; the following year a new edition was issued at Frankfurt am Main; in 1736 the Maurists republished it, expanding it; in 1766 a new edition appeared in 4 vols., with the supplement by Dom Carpentier, later merged with the original text in subsequent reprints; between 1840 and 1850, under the Didot imprint, another edition was produced, the most important after the first, edited by M. Henschel; in 1883 L. Favre published another, enlarged edition at Niort, based on that of Henschel. Although the horizon of medieval Latin studies has expanded immeasurably over the course of nearly three centuries, and Du Cange’s *Glossarium* is today in many respects inadequate, no dictionary has ever been able to replace it: the vastness of its documentation, always precisely cited and drawn from charters and literary texts that were for the most part unpublished at the time, and the soundness of its approach—which, for its age, was prodigious (having sought the forms of medieval Latin in notarial documents rather than in doctrinal treatises or literary books, it anticipated by a long way the modern conception of language as a living, evolving element—make it still today an invaluable working tool, as Mabillon described it in the preface to *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 Lyons in 1683 in 2 vols., and went through several reprints (the last, anastatic, in 1944); it did not enjoy the same renown as the Latin one, though it provided the first impetus for the study of Byzantine language and civilization, yet it too remains, to this day, irreplaceable.
Besides his published works, Du Cange left a considerable number of manuscripts, which were variously dispersed after the death of his sons but were largely recovered by the French government. They fall into three groups: the first, the richest, concerns the history of France and consists of a large body of monographic essays and studies on historical questions and periods, intended for a general history of France; the second relates to the history of Picardy; the third is miscellaneous and contains dissertations on the most varied subjects. Among posthumous works worthy of mention are *Les familles d’outre mer*, left unfinished by Du Cange and continued by decree of the Minister of Public Instruction (1854) first by N. R. Taranne and then, after his death, by E. G. Rey, 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 edition of 1879.
