Scholars and great works

How to tell an authentic charter from a forgery: script, formulae, seals, dating, the circumstances of production. A disciplined way of testing documentary evidence, worked out inside an existing scholarly quarrel and not in isolation.

Dated witnesses compared, so that a Greek hand can be placed in time. The book gave the field both its name and its first systematic treatment.

Eclipses, Easter cycles and the concordance of calendars in tables. Prepared from dom Maur Dantine’s research and carried through by dom Clémencet and dom Durand.

Du Cange was a layman, an avocat at the Parlement of Paris, and not a Maurist: the congregation’s achievement is the revised and greatly enlarged edition in six folio volumes, with dom Carpentier’s four-volume supplement of 1766.

Thirty years gathering the Old Latin versions from manuscripts, patristic quotations and liturgical books, printed beside the Vulgate. The Beuron Vetus Latina, begun in 1949, is expressly its successor.

What survives of Origen’s six-column comparison, collected from citations and marginal readings. The original was already lost; this is a gathering of fragments, not a recovery.

Prepared at Saint-Germain-des-Prés by dom Jacques Loppin, dom Montfaucon and dom Antoine Pouget — a team, over years, of the kind these editions always required.

Sincera records an editor’s critical judgement on which martyr narratives deserve credit — a judgement later scholarship has revisited.

The letters of the popes and those addressed to them, from AD 67 to 440. Coustant died the year it appeared and only this first volume was ever printed.

Chant treated as a measurable thing — consonances and ratios — before it is treated as a taste. With dom Martène’s work on ancient rites, the Maurist witness to how worship was actually performed.

Professor of Greek and Hebrew, then librarian of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. His Grammatica hebraica et chaldaica appeared in his lifetime; the lexicon, carried only as far as the letter mem, was finished by his brethren and printed in 1746.

Born at Le Mans, he learned Breton as an adult and spent his last thirty years at Landévennec. The printed text is an abridged and reworked posthumous edition by his confrère dom Taillandier, paid for by the Estates of Brittany.

A Maurist who took up Cartesian philosophy, and whose book drew Malebranche into a public controversy over the disinterested love of God. Not to be confused with Bernard Lamy, of the Oratory.

Begun at Saint-Germain-des-Prés as an enlarged translation of Christian Wolff’s mathematical lexicon, then recast as an encyclopaedic dictionary, and abandoned unpublished. Traditionally attributed to dom Antoine-Joseph Pernety and dom François de Brézillac — the manuscripts are unsigned, and the hands point to further compilers still unidentified. Some 1,400 folio leaves survive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.Studied by Linn Holmberg, The Maurists’ Unfinished Encyclopedia, Voltaire Foundation, 2017

Cellarer of Bonne-Nouvelle and inventor of the equation clock: a treatise on the tides, then a general treatise on clocks closing with a catalogue of earlier writers. His tidal explanation is of historical interest and scientifically superseded.

How to trace a sundial exactly: geometry and solar time brought together in a usable instrument. Applied mathematics, not a new astronomical law.

Wind, pipe alloys, proportions, workshop tools, plate after plate, for the Académie’s Description des arts et métiers. A complex craft made explicit and transmissible — still the reference for restoring a classical organ.

Two anonymous compilations — La médecine et la chirurgie des pauvres and a Dictionnaire botanique et pharmaceutique — reprinted and enlarged into the nineteenth century. Works of compilation for practical use; he held no medical qualification.

Chaplain and naturalist on Bougainville’s voyage to the Malouines in 1763-1764, and not on the later circumnavigation. Plants, birds, and one of the earliest known published descriptions of the boulder fields now called stone runs.

Dom de La Bezardais, prior of La Couture, and dom de Gennes, last librarian of Saint-Vincent du Mans, both directed it. Diseased ears of wheat shown in 1766, a report on sowing rye in 1773, three horses killed by yew described in 1776: observations shared in a learned network, not controlled trials.

Artistic practice treated as a subject for systematic explanation. Its title page presents him as a Benedictine of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, which he left later in life.

The French heritage inventory names Bourlet, a lay brother of the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, as the author of this life-size marble, classified as a historic object in 1905. The record gives a century, not a year.base Palissy, PM75001754

The same inventory attributes the bronze relief at the base of the king’s monument to Thibaut, likewise a lay brother of the abbey. The marble above it is given to the Marsy brothers.base Palissy, PM75001748

Its first two volumes carry an engraved reproduction of the whole Bayeux Tapestry, the 1730 plates engraved after drawings Montfaucon commissioned from Antoine Benoît. Drawn in the taste of their century rather than as a facsimile — but a record of the embroidery long before photography and before the nineteenth-century repairs.

About a dozen religious architects in the seventeenth century alone. Plans were surveyed on the spot and drawn twice — one copy for approval at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, one kept in the house. That practice is why the plans of this abbey survive at all.

A rich visual record of the Congregation’s monasteries, their buildings, gardens and precincts — and, equally, of how each community wished its house to be seen. Some views show what was intended rather than what stood.