Gilles Ménage
Gilles Ménage ( Aegidius Menagius, * August 15, 1613 in Angers, † July 23, 1692 in Paris) was a French writer and philologist.
Life
Ménage came from a family of lawyers and studied law to his father and his grandfather ( who had also operated as a legal author) to be a lawyer. Although he was admitted as a lawyer at the Parlement of Paris, but he was apparently due to health reasons, the jurisprudence on, even before he had fairly begun. He let himself be obtained from the Low ordinations and received the benefice of a Kommendatarabtes in Montdidier ( Picardy ), which secured him a certain income, but no local presence required, so that he as l' Abbé Ménage, as he was now called, his literary and could pursue philological interests.
For some years he belonged to the circle of associates of Jean -François Paul de Gondi, the industrious coadjutor and designated successor of the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal de Retz future. Here he found an opportunity to weave a network of contacts in intellectually interested Parisian circles. He frequented the salon of the novelist Madeleine de Scudéry, where he among other things, the young Marquise de Sévigné met and eager pupil found in the form of the young Marie -Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, who later became a novelist Madame de La Fayette.
After 1648 he fell out with his patron Gondi and moved into the Domherrenstift of Notre -Dame de Paris. Here he held a literary salon, which he called Mercuriales ( = the Mittwöchlichen ) because Wednesday ( lat. this Mercurii ) of the regular meeting of the meeting was. Here perverted et al the writers Jean Chapelain, Paul Pellisson, Valentin Conrart and Jean François Sarrazin.
Ménage wrote French, Italian and Latin. A constant theme of his poems ( madrigals, eclogues, epistles, epigrams ) was the worship of women. In his work spreading the bouts - rimes will go back into the salons, which are expected as other fashion literature into the environment preciousness.
He was a member of the scholars and writers association Accademia della Crusca the Florentine. His works della lingua italiana origini Le (1685 ) and Dictionnaire de la langue étymologique ou Origen Francoise ( 1694 ) were later for the founder of Romance Linguistics, Friedrich Diez, important sources.
Because of its militant character he had numerous enemies, eg philologists Claude Favre de Vaugelas, he inveighed against in his Observations sur la langue française about the correct use of language. Molière took him as a model for the figure of pedantic scholars Vadius in Les femmes savantes ( 1672). Also by Nicolas Boileau Ménage was ridiculed in the Satires.
His thoughts and bon mots were in 1693 in a posthumous compilation, the Menagiana published.
Works
- Poemata latina gallica, graeca, et italica ( 1656)
- Della lingua italiana Origini ( 1669)
- Dictionnaire étymologique (1650 and 1670 )
- Observations sur la langue française (1672-1676)
- Histoire de Sablé (1683 )
- Anti- Bailet ( 1690)
- Historia mulierum philosopharum ( 1690; French Histoire des femmes philosophes, Paris 2003)
- Menagiana ( 1693)