Étienne Dolet
French translator and scholar (1509-1546)
Étienne Dolet (3 August 1509 – 3 August 1546) was a French scholar, translator and printer. Dolet was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. His early attacks upon the Inquisition, the city council and other authorities in Toulouse, together with his later publications in Lyon treating of theological subjects, roused the French Inquisition to monitor his activities closely. After being imprisoned several times, he was eventually convicted of heresy, strangled and burned with his books due to the combined efforts of the Parlement of Paris, the Inquisition, and the theological faculty of the Sorbonne.
Quotes
edit- Non dolet ipse Dolet, sed pia turba dolet.
- It is not Dolet who grieves, but the sympathetic crowd.
- The jeu de mots ('play on words') which he is said to have uttered on the way to the scaffold: reported by Irma Dreyfus, Lectures on French Literature, translated by James Smith (1896), p. 94
