Jacques Pelletier du Mans

Jacques Pelletier du Mans, also spelled Peletier (Iacobus Peletarius Cenomani, 25 July 1517 – 17 July 1582) was a humanist, poet and mathematician of the French Renaissance. Born in Le Mans into a bourgeois family, he studied at the Collège de Navarre in Paris, where his brother Jean was a professor of mathematics and philosophy. He subsequently studied law and medicine, frequented the literary circle around Marguerite de Navarre and from 1541 to 1543 he was secretary to René du Bellay. In 1541 he published the first French translation of Horace's Ars Poetica and during this period he also published numerous scientific and mathematical treatises. In 1547 he produced a funeral oration for Henry VIII of England and published his first poems (Œuvres poétiques), which included translations from the first two cantos of Homer's Odyssey and the first book of Virgil's Georgics, twelve Petrarchian sonnets, three Horacian odes and a Martial-like epigram; this poetry collection also included the first published poems of Joachim Du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard (Ronsard would include Jacques Pelletier into his list of revolutionary contemporary poets La Pléiade). He then began to frequent a humanist circle around Théodore de Bèze, Jean Martin, Denis Sauvage. In the Renaissance, the French language had acquired many inconsistencies in spelling through attempts to model French words on their Latin roots (see Middle French). Pelletier tried to reform French spelling in his 1550 treatise Dialogue de l'ortografe e prononciation françoese ("Dialogue on French spelling and pronunciation"), advocating a phonetic-based spelling using new typographic signs which he would continue to use in all his published works. In this system, he consistently spells his name with one "l": Peletier. Pelletier was principal of the Collège de Bayeux and subsequently spent many years in Bordeaux, Poitiers, Piedmont (where he may have been the tutor of the son of Maréchal de Brissac), and Lyon (where he frequented the poets and humanists Maurice Scève, Louise Labé, Olivier de Magny and Pontus de Tyard).