Two other birthdays I just posted of two early modern Frenchmen (I pen these on Twitter first, which I think helps regulate my verboseness and forces me to split things up into nice, pertinent facts-sized chunks):

“The greatest scholar of modern times” is how Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan Smith, editors of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, describe Joseph Justus Scaliger (lower right, last picture), who was born 5 August 1540, in the index to that book. (What about Isaac Casaubon? Georgius Agricola? Greater than them?) Scaliger is credited with expanding the idea of “classical literature” to include not only Greek and Latin literature but also Egyptian, Persian, Babylonian and Jewish history.

I have not read anything by Scaliger except for the many times he is quoted in a book I love, Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Evidently Scaliger was not just a great classicist; he is one of Robert Burton’s favorite writers to quote, so evidently his Latin must be witty in some degree. There are English translations of his autobiography and his letters available at the Herman B. Wells Library at IU, so I hope to read some of his prose in its original context soon.

The other profile I wrote in past couple days: Born on August 4, 1604, François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac, a French playwright and one of the earliest drama theorists after Aristotle, author of a book I’m keen to dig into, La Pratique du Theatre (translated in 1684 as The Whole Art of the Stage, containing etc.”)