Denis Lambin (Latinized as Dionysius Lambinus; 1520 – September 1572) was a French
classical scholar.
Life
Lambin was born at
Montreuil, Pas-de-Calais. Having devoted several years to classical studies during a residence in
Italy, he was invited to
Paris in 1550 to fill the professorship of Latin in the
Collège de France, which he soon afterwards exchanged for that of Greek. His lectures were frequently interrupted by his ill-health and the religious disturbances of the time. His death is said to have been caused by his apprehension that he might share the fate of his friend
Pierre de la Ramée
Petrus Ramus (french: Pierre de La Ramée; Anglicized as Peter Ramus ; 1515 – 26 August 1572) was a French humanist, logician, and educational reformer. A Protestant convert, he was a victim of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.
Early life ...
, who had been killed in the
massacre of St Bartholomew
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (french: Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy) in 1572 was a targeted group of assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence, directed against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants) during the French War ...
.
Works
Lambin was one of the greatest scholars of his age, and his editions of classical authors are still useful. In
textual criticism he was a conservative, but by no means a slavish one; indeed, his opponents accused him of rashness in emendation. His chief defect is that he refers vaguely to his manuscripts without specifying the source of his readings, so that their relative importance cannot be estimated. But his commentaries, with their wealth of illustration and parallel passages, are a mine of information. In the opinion of the best scholars, he preserved the happy mean in his annotations, although his own countrymen have coined the word ''lambiner'' to express trifling and diffuseness.
His chief editions are:
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (; 8 December 65 – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his ' ...
(1561);
Lucretius (1563),
on which see
H. A. J. Munro's preface to his edition;
Cicero (1566);
Cornelius Nepos (1569);
Demosthenes (1570), completing the unfinished work of
Guillaume Morel
Guillaume Morel (1505 – 19 February 1564), French classical scholar, was born at Le Teilleul in Normandy.
After acting as proof-reader in a Paris firm, he set up for himself, and subsequently succeeded Turnebus as king's printer
P ...
; and
Plautus (1576).
References
Further reading
*
Peter Lazer
Peter may refer to:
People
* List of people named Peter, a list of people and fictional characters with the given name
* Peter (given name)
** Saint Peter (died 60s), apostle of Jesus, leader of the early Christian Church
* Peter (surname), a sur ...
, ''De Dionysio Lambino narratio'', printed in
Orelli's ''Onomasticon Tullianum'' (i. 1836);
* : ''Mureti, Lambini, Regii'' (Paris, 1579);
*
John Edwin Sandys, ''History of Classical Scholarship'' (1908, ii. 188);
*
Adalbert Horawitz
Adalbert is a German given name which means "noble bright" or "noble shining", derived from the words ''adal'' (meaning noble) and ''berht'' (shining or bright). Alternative spellings include Adelbart, Adelbert and Adalberto. Derivative names inclu ...
in Ersch and Gruber's ''Allgemeine Encyclopädie''.
*
External links
Titi Lucretii Cari ''De rerum natura libri sex'' published in Paris 1563, later owned and annotated by
Montaigne
Michel Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne ( ; ; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592), also known as the Lord of Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularizing the essay as a liter ...
, fully digitised in
Cambridge Digital Library
Lambin's posthumously published Plautus edition at Google Books
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lambin, Denis
1520 births
1572 deaths
People from Montreuil, Pas-de-Calais
French classical scholars