Bernard de Montfaucon - Career

Career

Montfaucon served in the French army as volunteer and participated in the Franco-Dutch War in 1673. He was a captain of grenadiers and made two campaigns under the orders of Turenne, participated in the Battle of Marienthal and fell ill in Saverne (in Alsace). Because of his infectious illness he made a vow to Notre-Dame of Marceille, to give one hundred livres to her chapel and to become a Benedictine, if he was to go back to his country, as a result of her intervention.

After the death of his father in the Château de Roquetaillade, he took the Benedictine habit in 1675, in the monastery of Bream in Toulouse; there he learned several ancient languages: Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, and Coptic.

In 1687 Montfaucon was called to the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and he started to work on an edition of the works of the Greek Church Fathers.

In 1705 he examined and described the manuscripts of the Fonds Coislin, in Bibliotheca Coisliniana (Paris, 1705). In 1708 in Palaeographia Graeca Montfaucon became the first to use the term "palaeography". The work illustrates the entire history of Greek writing. It contains Montfaucon's discussions of variations in Greek letter forms, the use of abbreviations in Greek manuscripts, and the process of deciphering archaic writing. It was Montfaucon's special interest. In this work he often cited Greek manuscripts in texts of Athanasius of Alexandria, Origen, and John Chrysostom. The book dealt so comprehensively with the handwriting and other characteristics of Greek manuscripts that it remained the leading authority on the subject for almost two centuries.

In 1714 Montfaucon published the fragments of Hexapla of Origen.

He published 15 volumes of L'antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures between 1719 and 1724. An English translation of this work was published in 1721–25 under the title Antiquity Explained and Represented in Diagrams. The work contained copperplate folio engravings of classical antiquities. It included a depiction of the "Barberini Vase", more commonly known as the "Portland Vase". This book is published in English under the title Antiquities. The materials used in this work were taken from the manuscripts deposited in French libraries. It contains many illustrative facsimiles, though they are engraved in a rather coarse way.

In 1719, Montfaucon was named by Philippe d'Orléans to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. In 1719 after the death of the Jesuit father Michel Le Tellier, confessor to the late Louis XIV, Bernard de Montfaucon took his place as confessor to the young Louis XV.

Bernard de Montfaucon died on December 21, 1741 in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

In a letter of June 24, 1786, Josiah Wedgwood explains that he had seen Montfaucon's engravings of the Portland Vase.

Montfaucon was the original editor of the homilies Adversus Judaeos by saint John Chrysostom along with many other works of the Fathers of the Church.

Montfaucon laid the foundation for the study of Greek manuscripts. Scrivener stated, that his work still maintains a high authority, even "after more recent discoveries", especially of papyri in Egypt. Present scholars agree that he created a new discipline, palaeography, and presented it in a perfected way.

Montfaucon is largely responsible for bringing the famous Bayeux Tapestry to the attention of the public. In 1724, the scholar Antoine Lancelot discovered drawings of a section of the Tapestry (about 30 feet of the Tapestry's 231 feet) among papers of Nicolas-Joseph Foucault, a Norman administrator. (These drawings of the Tapestry's images "classicized" the otherwise cruder Anglo-Norman style by adding shadows and dimensionality to the figures.) Lancelot, unsure of what medium these drawings depicted, suggested that they might be tomb relief, stained glass, fresco, or even a tapestry. When Lancelot presented Foucault's drawings in 1724 to the Academie Royal des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, they attracted the attention of Montfaucon, who subsequently tracked down the textile in the drawings with help from Benedictine colleagues in Normandy. This is often regarded as the modern "discovery" of the Bayeux Tapestry, which had gone on quiet display annually in the Bayeux Cathedral for possibly centuries. Montfaucon published the Foucault drawings in the first volume his Les Monumens de la Monarchie Francoise . In anticipation of volume 2 of Les Monumens, Montfaucon employed the artist Antoine Benoit and sent him to Bayeux to copy the Tapestry in its entirety and in a manner faithful to its style, unlike Foucault's "touched up" renditions which were more suitable to 18th-century French tastes. Emory University art history professor Elizabeth Carson Pastan criticizes Montfaucon for his "Norman Triumphalist" point of view in dealing with the story of the Tapestry, despite the fact that he asserted that one should trust "the best historians of Normandy." She does state, however, that modern scholars are indebted to him for his process of examining many accounts of the Norman Conquest in interpreting the Tapestry, and his highlighting of the Tapestry's ambiguity and enigma (such as why Harold Godwinson went to Normandy in 1064 or the identity of the elusive Aelfgyva).