Etienne Pasquier – remarkable personality of the French Renaissance
Etienne Pasquier (1529-1615), humanist, historian, lawyer, and poet, was one of the most remarkable personalities of the French Renaissance. His most famous work is Recherches de la France (1560-1621), a monumental collection of erudite studies about the history of France from a political, religious, and literary point of view. Etienne Pasquier is considered to be the true founder of modern historiography in France. A great scholar and patriot, he analyzed the origins and evolution of French institutions from an innovating perspective, combining the historical research with the social one. The author examined not only the events, but also customs, literary ideas, and the language of his time. Recherches de la France, even through its own title, proposes a research and not only a simple description. The research is based on documents and the method used by the author is a critical one, inherited from the preceding generation of humanists which made use of the resources of philology and law. Appreciated by his contemporary fellows for his entire activity, the true precursor of modern erudition, the ardent defender of the French language and of the intellectual orthography, Etienne Pasquier remains through his works a celebrated representative of the French Renaissance. Recherches de la France also arrived in Transylvania. An exemplary from 1596, printed in Paris, is proudly kept in the collections of the Central University Library “Lucian Blaga” in Cluj-Napoca.
Keywords: Etienne Pasquier, Recherches de la France, French Renaissance, modern historiography, Transylvania, library.
