Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont

Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont
240px de Tillemont based on portrait by Claude Lefebvre
Born	(1637-11-30)30 November 1637
Died
Education	Petites écoles of Port-Royal
Occupation	Cleric and historian

Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (30 November 1637 – 10 January 1698) was a French Roman Catholic priest and ecclesiastical historian.

Biography

He belonged to a noble family of the robe, originally from Tours, but since the end of the 16th century a member of the King's Council and the Parliament of Paris (with Jean Le Nain, seigneur de Beaumont, who became the King's secretary in 1590). His father, Jean IV Le Nain (1613–1698), owner of the estate and château de Tillemont (near Montreuil), was a member of the Parliament from 1632, and Master of Requests at the Royal Household in 1642; he remains famous for his Parliament Table in 83 volumes, a methodical compilation, accompanied by erudite notes, of extracts from the registers of the Parliament of Paris since the 13th century — an important monument in the history of law. His mother, whose maiden name was Marie Le Ragois, came from a financial family that also included several members of the judiciary and the royal administration. The couple, very pious and linked to Jansenist circles, had at least seven living children.

Louis-Sébastien first attended the Little Schools of Port-Royal. In 1661, on the recommendation of Lemaistre de Sacy, he was admitted to the seminary of Beauvais, a town whose bishop was then (from 1650 to 1679) Choart de Buzenval, a former lawyer, parliamentarian and State Councillor with close ties to Port-Royal and the Jansenists (the seminary of his diocese was then considered the "university" of this movement). Louis-Sébastien Le Nain was a student at the seminary for three years (1661–1664), then moved in with Canon Godefroy Hermant (former rector of the University of Paris from 1646 to 1648, a leading figure on the seminary's faculty), where he remained from 1664 to 1669.

After the "Peace of the Church" and the reopening of Port-Royal-des-Champs, Le Nain joined the "Messieurs" and moved close to the establishment, where he often visited. He was ordained sub-deacon in 1672, and priest in 1676. In 1679, the "Solitaires of Port-Royal" were disbanded by order of François de Harlay de Champvallon, Archbishop of Paris, and Le Nain retired to Tillemont, his family's small estate between Montreuil and Vincennes. There, until his death, he led a very austere life, devoting himself to his historical works. He began publication of History of the Emperors... in 1690, and Memoirs Illustrating the Ecclesiastical History... in 1693, but only four volumes (out of six) of the former and four volumes (out of sixteen) of the latter appeared during his lifetime. He also spent two years collecting documents and compiling notes on Saint Louis for Lemaistre de Sacy, who died too soon to use them (this work was published in six volumes by the Society of the History of France in 1847–51).

Works

His vocation as a historian had been awakened by reading Caesar Baronius's Ecclesiastical Annals, and he had conceived the idea of going back to the sources from which this author had drawn at an early age. At the age of eighteen (in 1655), he began painstakingly assembling the material for his two major works, the fruit of over forty years' work. Canon Hermant, with whom he studied for eight years, was an acknowledged specialist in the history of the early centuries of the Church.

In historical method, he shows himself to be a disciple of Dom Mabillon.

His method is based on the use of reliable historical material, validated by scrupulous examination and the principles of historical criticism. He writes in a simple style, free from literary flourishes, and gives many concrete, precise details. He writes not for the general public, but for scholars, and bases his legitimacy on experience, which would enable him to separate true information from false.

He studied the period from Augustus to Justinian as a whole, without distinguishing between the West and the East, but the separation between his two major works testifies to his concern to distinguish between secular and ecclesiastical history, and thus identify the logic of political power.

His History began to issue from the press in 1690 and his Memoirs in 1693. The first is a history of the first six centuries of the Christian Church. The second is a history of the Roman emperors during the same period. The publication of both works was not complete at the time of his death. The final volumes were completed and published posthumously by his secretary Michel Tronchay. Tronchay also published a biography of Tillemont in 1706 titled Idea of the Life and Mind of M. L. de Tillemont.

His works were among the first to provide critical surveys of the full range of source material. His prose style is considered dry, but he had a reputation for accuracy, detail and conscientiousness. His work was attacked on a large scale by Honoratus a Sancta Maria — a noted adversary of Jansenism — in his Reflections on the Rules and Use of Criticism (1712–1720).

Major publications

• Histoire des empereurs et des autres princes qui ont régné durant les six premiers siècles de l'Église (6 vol.), 1690–97, 1701, 1738.
• Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire ecclésiastique des six premiers siècles, justifiés par les citations des auteurs originaux avec une chronologie où l'on fait un abrégé de l'histoire ecclésiastique et avec des notes pour éclaircir les difficultés des faits et de la chronologie (16 vol.), 1693–1712.
• Vie de saint Louis roi de France (6 vol.), editor Jules Renouard, Paris, 1847–1851.
• Calendrier des fêtes des saints illustres, 1919.

References

• Bourdé, Guy; Hervé Martin & Pascal Balmand (1997). Les écoles historiques. Paris: Seuil.
• Neveu, Bruno (1965). "Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637-1698). Étude biographique et bibliographique d'après des documents inédits." In: École pratique des hautes études. 4e section, Sciences historiques et philologiques. Annuaire 1965-1966,‎ pp. 495–508.
• Neveu, Bruno (1967). "Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont, 1637-1698, et l'érudition ecclésiastique de son temps." In: Religion, érudition et critique à la fin du 17e siècle et au début du 18e s. Paris: P.U.F.
• Neveu, Bruno (1976). "Le Nain de Tillemont et la Vie de Saint Louis." In: Actes des colloques de Royaumont et de Paris, 21-27 mai 1970. Paris: Les Belles lettres, pp. 315–29.
• Pellistrandi, Stan-Michel (2002). Le Nain de Tillemont et l'historiographie de l'Antiquité romaine. Actes du colloque international organisé par le Centre Le Nain de Tillemont et tenu à la Fondation Singer-Pollignac... les 19 et 20 novembre 1998 et à l'Institut de France le 21 novembre 1998. Paris: H. Champion.
• Ridley, Ronald T. (1992). "On Knowing Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont: For the Tercentenary of his Histoire," Ancient Society, Vol. XXIII, pp. 233–95.
• Sommer, Andreas Urs (2006). Sinnstiftung durch Geschichte? Zur Entstehung spekulativ-universalistischer Geschichtsphilosophie zwischen Bayle und Kant. Basel: Schwabe, pp. 77–86.

External links

• Works by Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont at Gallica