The Parisian magistrate Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553-1617) was a major figure in the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) and their immediate aftermath. Best known for his magisterial History of his own times (covering 1546-1607), and his complementary Memoirs (covering 1553-1601), de Thou was a key political negotiator, a famous book-collector and an influential patron to scholars and writers, as well as a respected poet in his own right and a prolific correspondent. This is the first monograph on de Thou since Samuel Kinser's bibliographical study of 1966. In the course of five chapters, thematically arranged between a substantial introduction and a dramatic conclusion, Ingrid De Smet meticulously unpicks de Thou's strategies of self-fashioning and career enhancement as well as the conditions that led to his fall from grace. In doing so, this monograph not only rehabilitates de Thou as a creative (neo-Latin) writer of international allure, it also uncovers and contextualizes the complexities of de Thou's life, writings, and thought.

Until the nineteenth century Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553-1617) was among the most famous and most valued of historians. While his first fame was a succes de scandale - the History of His Time was placed on the Index in 160g - de Thou's work quickly found favor with the humanistically-educated learned class throughout Europe. The esteem in which the History was held transcended religious divisions. The historian received letters of praise from staunchly orthodox Spain and Portugal as well as from heretic England and Germany; through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries his History was read with enthusi asm by certain cardinals at the very curia which condemned it; and so staunch a champion of orthodoxy as Bishop Bossuet did not hesitate to appeal to "such a great author" for support in his own historical works. ! To the philosophe of the Enlightenment de Thou's impartiality in de scribing the impassioned times through which he lived and the exact yet eloquent style with which he wrote the History of His Time were familiar touchstones. Voltaire appealed to the "truthful and eloquent de Thou" again and again in his works,2 William Pitt rose in the House of Commons to quote the words of the "great historian of France" during the early years of the French Revolution,3 Lessing 4 and Herder 5 praised him with poetic hyperbole, and Edward Gibbon re ferred to "the authority of my masters, the grave Thuanus and the philosophic Hume . . . .