A Brill Calendar: August 3

Few independent minds have the 'honour' of being officially condemned both by the Roman Catholic Church and by Jean Calvin.

The wayward scholar in question, Étienne Dolet, was burned at the stake at Paris on his 37th birthday; an exceptional man in an exceptional age.

Study at the universities of Paris, Padua and Venice had prepared him for a scholarly existence. He settled briefly at Toulouse University before being banished from there, charged with manslaughter; (his talent to attract controversy and bad blood is not to be envied)... Dolet became also notorious for a polemic in print on the merits of Cicero’s Latin as a role-model for humanist scholarship. In considerations ventilated in his ‘Dialogus de imitatione ciceroniana’ (1535), the young dog even dared to gainsay the great Erasmus; by then too old and ill to react in public on Dolet’s critique.

Eventually, the French King, Francois I, allowed the controversial scholar to open a print-shop; and Dolet’s editions of the New Testament, Book of Psalms, classical authors, and Erasmus, not to mention his contemporary Francois Rabelais (1483 – 1553) made him famous as an entrepreneur in the ‘information age’ of Renaissance Reformation.

Dolet was imprisoned thrice: in ’42, ’44 and ’46; with the last occasion proving to be fatal. It is seldom that passion for great literature found itself suffering from such inclement intellectual weather. Jean Calvin survived Dolet by 18 years and died in bed, his devoted disciples and followers surrounding the theologian who had shown during his stormy existence little patience with institutionalizing his views and convictions concerning the Creator and His salvation of Man’s soul.