Jean Mabillon

Dom Jean Mabillon, O.S.B., (23 November 1632 – 27 December 1707) was a French Benedictine monk and scholar of the Congregation of Saint Maur. He is considered the founder of palaeography and diplomatics.

Mabillon was born in the town of Saint-Pierremont, then in the ancient Province of Champagne, now a part of the Department of Ardennes. He was the son of Estienne Mabillon (who died in 1692 at age 104) and Jeanne Guérin. At age 12 he entered the Collège des Bons Enfants in Reims and in 1650 entered the seminary. He left the seminary in 1653 and instead became a monk in the Maurist Abbey of Saint-Remi. His devotion to his studies there left him ill, and he was sent to Corbie Abbey in 1658 to regain his strength. In 1663 he transferred again to Saint-Denis Abbey near Paris, and the next year to the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, where he met and worked with many other scholars, including Luc d'Achery, Charles du Fresne, Sieur du Cange, Etienne Baluze, and Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont.

In Saint-Germain, Mabillon edited the works of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (published in 1667), and also worked on the Lives of the Benedictine Saints ("Acta Ordinis S. Benedicti") (published in nine volumes between 1668 and 1701). The later work was undertaken in collaboration with Luc d'Achery, an older scholar and long-lasting librarian of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, who had collected the historical materials which Mabillon used. A foreword which Mabillon later added used the lives of the saints in order to illustrate the history of the early Middle Ages.

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