Étienne Dolet : the Martyr of the Renaissance, 1508-1546. A biography / by Richard Copley Christie.

  • Richard Copley Christie
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Étienne Dolet : the Martyr of the Renaissance, 1508-1546. A biography / by Richard Copley Christie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    progress, at least in Germany, the Low Countries, and France, commenced which has ever since continued. In Italy, indeed, the rulers of the Church, until awakened by the tidings of the preaching of Luther, were blind to the real tendency of the age ; and even when roused so as to recognise and attempt to meet the danger, they must have the credit of still for some time seeking to encourage literature and learning provided no doctrine or practice of the Church was attacked. !£tienne Dolet, whose life I am about to narrate, was a child of the pure Italian Renaissance, more truly and thoroughly so than any other of the scholars and students whom France produced. Though constantly stated to have been an atheist, and probably condemned and burnt as such, his writings afford no ground for the general belief. He was no doubt a pagan of the school of Bembo and Longolius, and with them thought the religion of Cicero more suited to the man of culture than a system which held out for the worship or adoration of the faithful the wine of the marriage feast of Cana, the comb of the Virgin Mary, and the shield of St, Michael the archangel. Yet there is nothing in any of his writings inconsistent with the doctrines of the Church or disrespectful to her authority. He was no believer in, and indeed had no sort of sympathy with the doctrines of Luther and Calvin, and desired nothing better than to be allowed to pursue in freedom his literary studies relating to this worid without troubling himself about the next, but he lived in a time and place especially unfortunate for one of his character. Half a century earlier, before the Church had awaked to the idea that intellectual progress of every kind was altogether subversive of her authority, he would have been hailed as one of the restorers of letters in France, would probably have become an ambassador, and possibly a cardinal. He was born at Orleans in the year 1508, on the 3rd of
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