Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye

Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye
La Curne de Sainte-Palaye and his twin
Born	June 1697 Auxerre
Died	1 March 1781 (aged 83) Paris

Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (June 1697, Auxerre – 1 March 1781, Paris) was a French historian, classicist, philologist and lexicographer.

From an ancient family, his father Edme had been gentleman of the bedchamber to the Duke of Orléans, brother of Louis XIV (a position Jean-Baptiste held for a time under the regent Orléans) and then receiver of the salt grenier in Auxerre. La Curne de Sainte-Palaye's health was delicate and so he only began his classical studies aged 15, but he read with such enthusiasm and studied so successfully that his reputation alone (he had not yet published anything) got him elected as a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1724, aged only 27. That same year he took on a study of the medieval chroniclers, which led him to research into the origins of chivalry. He then spent one year (1725) spent at the court of king Stanislas, as charged by the correspondence between this prince and the French court.

After his Polish stay wrote a mémoire on two passages from Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1727) and numerous other memoirs on Roman history, before moving to work on French history. From then on he almost exclusively devoted himself to the study and recovery of manuscripts relating to the history of France's language and institutions. He began a series of studies on the chroniclers of the Middle Ages for the Historiens des Gaules et de la France (edited by Martin Bouquet), Raoul Glaber, Helgaud, the Gesta of Louis VII, the chronicle of Morigny, Rigord and his continuator, William le Breton, the monk of St. Denis, Jean de Venette, Froissart and the Jouvencel.