Du Pinet de Noroy Antoine

Antoine Du Pinet, sieur de Noroy, whose name appears in sixteenth-century sources and later catalogues in such forms as Du Pinet, Du Pynet, Pignet, Pignetus and Pinaeus, was born probably around 1510 in Franche-Comté and died most plausibly in 1565 or early 1566.

Even these apparently elementary facts require qualification. La Croix du Maine made him a native of Besançon, whereas the Franc-Comtois historian Louis Gollut associated him with Baume-les-Dames; modern authority files usually prefer Besançon without resolving the older disagreement. More consequential is the problem of identity. The Lyonese translator and compiler Antoine Du Pinet has generally been identified with the Antoine Pignet who appears in Genevan ecclesiastical records and in correspondence with Calvin during the later 1530s. Irena Backus has rightly emphasized that this identification, although highly plausible and supported by the continuity of religious, linguistic and editorial activity, is not demonstrable beyond all doubt. The death date poses an even sharper problem. An older biographical tradition, followed by the IRHT authority record, gives Paris in 1584, whereas the Bibliothèque nationale de France records competing traditions of 1565–1566 and an uncertain sixteenth-century death. The strongest evidence is not a nineteenth-century biographical notice but the title of the second edition of Du Pinet’s Pliny, Lyon 1566, which explicitly states that the translation had been revised by him “un peu avant sa mort.” Unless that contemporary statement is dismissed as erroneous publishing rhetoric, it makes a death around 1565–1566 much more credible than 1584.

If the generally accepted identification with Antoine Pignet is retained, Du Pinet’s intellectual formation belongs to the same Franco-Swiss evangelical and humanist networks from which early French Calvinism emerged. Madeleine Lazard places him among the Burgenses, the students associated with Bourges, where Andrea Alciato and Melchior Wolmar represented two very different but complementary dimensions of Renaissance culture: humanist jurisprudence and philological education on the one hand, evangelical and Greek scholarship on the other. She further connects him with Johann Sturm in Paris before his establishment in the Genevan sphere. These affiliations should not be embellished into a curriculum for which complete matriculation evidence survives, but they explain remarkably well the capacities displayed throughout Du Pinet’s later career: facility in Latin, acquaintance with Greek and perhaps Hebrew, legal and canonical reading, a strong sense of textual comparison, and an ability to translate learned material into a vernacular form intelligible beyond the university. Lazard places him at Ville-la-Grand in the Chablais as early as 1536; Backus can document Antoine Pignet securely there as a minister by October 1538. The difference is best preserved rather than harmonized artificially.

His earliest securely recoverable activity links him directly with Jean Calvin’s publishing world. During Calvin’s Strasbourg exile, Pignet functioned as corrector, intermediary and informant, maintaining connections between Geneva, Lyon and Strasbourg and dealing with matters in which theology and printing were inseparable. On 4 October 1539 he wrote to Calvin after reading the Latin reply to Cardinal Sadoleto and proposed to translate it into French so that it might reach a larger readership. Later that month Calvin informed Guillaume Farel that two translators were competing over the task. A French version appeared at Geneva in 1540, from the press of Michel du Bois, but the surviving book does not identify which competitor produced it. Du Pinet’s authorship must therefore remain possible rather than certain. The episode is nevertheless revealing: even before his name became associated with major Lyonese translations, he understood translation as an instrument of confessional dissemination, capable of converting a Latin intervention addressed to learned and ecclesiastical readers into a French text for a much broader Protestant public.

The same environment produced another work traditionally connected with him, the Exposition de l’histoire des dix lépreux of 1539. Eugénie Droz attributed the French text to Du Pinet on linguistic and typographical grounds. It ultimately derives from Martin Luther, mediated through a Latin adaptation by Martin Bucer, and was associated with the Genevan press of Jean Girard. The Bibliothèque de Genève now catalogues Luther and Du Pinet together in connection with the surviving edition. Here again Du Pinet’s activity is best characterized as mediation rather than autonomous authorship: German Reformation preaching passed through Latin reformulation into French exposition, acquiring in the process an extended treatment of auricular confession and of the legitimate use of allegory in Scripture. The route Luther–Bucer–Du Pinet exemplifies the translational chains through which Reformation theology moved across linguistic boundaries.

Du Pinet’s first major publication underlies the same concern with vernacular religious instruction but operates on a much larger scale. The Familière et briefve exposition sur l’Apocalypse de sainct Jean l’apostre was printed at Geneva by Jean Girard in 1539, in octavo, and survives in an edition of 233 pages followed by twenty-one unnumbered pages. It was not an isolated devotional pamphlet but the beginning of a substantial editorial history. In 1543, again from Girard’s press, the book reappeared under the more explicit title Exposition sur l’Apocalypse de Sainct Jehan l’Apostre, extraicte de plusieurs docteurs tant anciens que modernes, described as revised and newly enlarged. The physical expansion is itself significant: the 1543 edition comprises twenty-four unnumbered pages, 408 numbered pages and forty-eight further pages. A further Geneva edition followed in 1545, and another edition is documented in 1557. The often repeated inclusion of a 1552 edition is much less securely supported by the principal surviving Genevan bibliographical records; the sequence that can presently be documented with confidence is therefore 1539, 1543, 1545 and 1557.

The expansion from 1539 to 1543 represents more than ordinary resetting. Irena Backus has shown that Du Pinet constructed his commentary through extensive use of earlier exegetes, especially Bede, François Lambert of Avignon and the Bernese reformer Sebastian Meyer. His originality lay less in proposing a new prophetic system than in selecting, translating, abridging and reorganizing learned interpretation for French readers without specialist theological training. The work thus belongs to an important class of Reformation books in which compilation was an intellectual act. Du Pinet decided what to preserve, what to simplify, what to redirect polemically and how to make a multilingual commentary tradition function inside a compact vernacular exposition. The 1543 revision modified some of the more conspicuous Joachite features of the earlier text while sharpening its application to contemporary confessional conflict. His interpretation of the millennium remained broadly Augustinian rather than millenarian, but the woman, dragon, beasts and persecuting powers of Revelation were increasingly made intelligible within the struggle between the Reformed churches and Roman ecclesiastical authority. The successive editions therefore preserve not merely commercial demand but the confessional revision of a living text.

Du Pinet’s relationship with the Genevan ministry did not remain stable.

By 1548 correspondence associates him with criticism of the severity with which certain Genevan ministers exercised admonition and discipline, and the episode belongs to the deterioration of his relationship with Calvin’s ecclesiastical circle. The precise circumstances of his departure should not be dramatized beyond the surviving evidence, but the chronological change is unmistakable: from the later 1540s he disappears from the immediate Genevan ministerial environment and becomes increasingly identifiable with Lyon. The IRHT authority record dates his Lyonese establishment from 1548, while Lazard describes him as a Lyonnais by adoption. This migration fundamentally altered the material context of his writing. Geneva had trained him in the tightly interconnected culture of Reformed ministry, translation, correction and confessional printing; Lyon offered one of Europe’s largest commercial book markets, with presses capable of producing substantial illustrated folios, small medical manuals, geographical compilations, classical translations and controversial literature for audiences extending far beyond any single confession.

The apparent discontinuity between Protestant controversialist and translator of natural history is therefore misleading. Du Pinet carried into Lyon the same intellectual habit that had characterized his Genevan work: he was a mediator of difficult textual traditions. During the 1550s his activities become less easily documented, but by the end of the decade he was working within networks connecting French, Italian and classical literature. Among his translations was the third book of the epistles of Antonio de Guevara, rendered into French not directly from Spanish but from the Italian version associated with Alfonso de Ulloa and printed as part of the French Guevara tradition in 1558–1560. The indirect route is characteristic of sixteenth-century translation. Du Pinet did not inhabit a modern regime in which fidelity was defined exclusively through return to the author’s original language; texts passed through commercially available intermediaries, and the translator’s function included adapting them to the expectations of a new linguistic market.

The year 1561 marks the decisive expansion of Du Pinet’s work into botany, medicine and natural history. At Lyon, Gabriel Cotier published his French translation of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s vast commentary on the six books of Dioscorides, Les Commentaires de M. Pierre André Matthiolus ... sur les six livres de Pedacius Dioscoride ... de la matière médicinale. This was an ambitious folio undertaking, making one of the century’s major works of pharmacological botany available in French. Mattioli’s commentary had itself grown far beyond a philological explanation of Dioscorides: it integrated plant identification, materia medica, observations upon animals and minerals, therapeutic applications, controversies with other botanists and an expanding visual apparatus. Du Pinet’s translation consequently involved not a single ancient author but Dioscorides as reconstructed, expanded and argued over by Mattioli. Later editions continued to identify his French translation explicitly, and its longevity—well into the seventeenth century—shows how successfully his language became attached to the French reception of Mattioli. A second impression appeared in 1566, and still later publishers retained and revised the translation.

Even more revealing is the second botanical publication issued by Cotier in the same year, the Historia plantarum. Earum imagines, nomenclaturae, qualitates, & natale solum. Quibus accessere simplicium medicamentorum facultates, secundum locos & genera, ex Dioscoride. Unlike the great French Mattioli, this is a Latin, highly portable illustrated compendium, running to 640 pages followed by a second sequence of 229 pages and an index, in a volume only about thirteen centimetres high. Contemporary bibliographical traditions vary in describing the format as in-12 or in-16, but there is no doubt about the deliberate smallness of the book. Its hundreds of woodcut images are accompanied by plant names, properties, habitats and medicinal indications; NLM cataloguing identifies the work explicitly as a compilation from Mattioli and other sources, while contemporary book-trade evidence classed it with Mattioli. It should therefore not be described as a wholly independent botanical system. Du Pinet extracted, reorganized and compressed information from the increasingly monumental Dioscoridean-Mattiolian tradition into a portable reference instrument.

The bibliographical relationship between the two Cotier publications is especially instructive. In one and the same year Du Pinet participated in the production of a large French translation of Mattioli and a diminutive Latin Historia plantarum built from related material. The contrast between them is striking: vernacular folio commentary and portable Latin illustrated epitome. Although no surviving contract has yet demonstrated a consciously articulated two-tier marketing strategy, the books clearly addressed different modes of reading. The folio offered discursive commentary and medical learning in expanded form; the smaller book sacrificed argument and textual amplitude for rapid identification, nomenclature, image and therapeutic utility. The Historia plantarum is consequently better understood as an early and important pocket botanical repertory than as “the first pocket herbal,” a claim that would ignore earlier small-format botanical and pharmacological printing. Its distinction lies in the compression of an unusually rich illustrated learned tradition into an extraordinarily portable sixteenth-century book.

Du Pinet’s greatest achievement as a translator appeared the following year. In 1562 Claude Senneton at Lyon published L’Histoire du monde de C. Pline Second in two folio volumes. This was the first complete printed French translation of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia; earlier French readers had possessed partial translations and epitomes, but not the entire encyclopaedia in the vernacular. The title page advertises an unusually interventionist editorial method: Pliny had been “collationnée et corrigée” against several old Latin exemplars, both printed and manuscript, and supplied with marginal annotations comparing ancient and modern names of cities, regions, plants and obscure terms. Du Pinet further appended a treatise reducing ancient weights and measures to French equivalents, together with extensive indexes. The translation was therefore conceived as an apparatus for making an ancient encyclopaedia practically intelligible, not simply linguistically accessible.

Du Pinet himself described the labour behind the book in terms that reveal the social range of Renaissance translation. He did not depend solely upon dictionaries and classical commentaries. Rendering Pliny’s technical vocabulary required consultation with founders, surveyors, miners, refiners, moneyers, painters, glassmakers, potters, goldsmiths, sculptors, engineers, masons, carpenters, lapidaries, apothecaries, dyers and surgeons. The ancient encyclopaedia was being translated through the living technical vocabularies of sixteenth-century France. This is one of the most significant aspects of the work. The translator became an intermediary between textual antiquity and artisanal knowledge, deciding where an ancient object or process could be correlated with contemporary terminology and where uncertainty had to remain. Rowan Tomlinson’s study of the 1562 Pliny has shown how Du Pinet negotiated the uneven epistemological status of the Natural History: reverence for Pliny coexists with comparison, clarification and recognition that the ancient observer had not personally seen everything he described. The result is therefore an act of vernacular encyclopaedic reconstruction, not a transparent linguistic transfer.

The editorial history of the translation confirms its importance. Senneton issued a second impression in 1566, whose title declares that the text had been diligently revised by Du Pinet shortly before his death. This formulation is one of the strongest pieces of biographical evidence surviving for the translator himself. A third impression appeared at Lyon in 1581 under Charles Pesnot, with further annotations, and subsequent editions carried Du Pinet’s Pliny into the seventeenth century: the BnF records editions of 1615, while a 1625 Cologny edition survives at the Bibliothèque de Genève. The translation therefore outlived its maker by several generations and became the principal French vehicle for the complete Plinian encyclopaedia before new early-modern modes of natural history finally displaced it.

Du Pinet’s next major publication demonstrates that his interest in ordering knowledge was not confined to texts inherited from antiquity. Plantz, pourtraitz et descriptions de plusieurs villes et forteresses, tant de l’Europe, Asie, & Afrique, que des Indes, & terres neuves was completed at Lyon on 15 April 1564 and printed by Jean d’Ogerolles. The BnF describes the book as an atlas of forty-one maps and views, accompanied by 308 pages of text and extensive prefatory and index material. Du Pinet dedicated it to François d’Agoult, comte de Sault, governor of Lyonnais. Its scope is deliberately large: cities and fortresses of Europe, Asia and Africa appear beside material relating to the Indies and newly encountered lands, while historical foundation narratives, antiquities, customs and topographical description accompany the images.

The intellectual framework is explicitly chorographical. Drawing upon the categories inherited from Ptolemaic geography, Du Pinet distinguishes the representation of the world and its great divisions from the detailed description of particular places. City plans, prospects and regional maps are therefore not decorative supplements to the text but forms of knowledge capable of rendering spatial relationships visible. Modern study of Renaissance urban cartography has consequently placed the Plantz among the important mid-sixteenth-century compilations situated between Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia and the much larger Civitates orbis terrarum of Braun and Hogenberg. Du Pinet was not creating every image afresh. The volume belongs to the characteristic Renaissance economy of adaptation and reuse: the BnF identifies models or adapted material connected with Münster, Philipp Apian, Gemma Frisius, Benedetto Bordone, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Guillaume Guéroult and others. The historical significance of the book therefore lies partly in its ability to gather heterogeneous cartographic and textual material into a coherent French chorographical sequence.

This compilation should not be dismissed as derivative. In sixteenth-century geographical publishing, selection, ordering and recombination were fundamental editorial operations. A plan copied from an earlier source acquired a different function when placed within a geographically ordered sequence, accompanied by a French description and connected through indexes with dozens of other cities. The Plantz gave readers a means of moving between image and text, local place and global order, antiquity and contemporary political geography. Some individual views preserve inaccuracies or imaginative conventions, but they could nevertheless become important witnesses to the history of urban representation; the Bordeaux view, for example, has long been valued as the earliest printed prospect to present the city in this particular form. The book’s importance belongs to the history of chorography and the printed city-book, rather than to an anachronistic notion of surveyed cartographic accuracy.

Remarkably, the same year saw Du Pinet return openly to the religious controversies of his Genevan formation. La Conformité des églises réformées de France et de l’Église primitive, en police et cérémonies, printed in 1564, sought to defend the institutional and ceremonial order of the French Reformed churches by comparison with Scripture, early councils and ancient ecclesiastical canons. Its argument is historical as much as doctrinal. Reformed practice is presented not as innovation but as recovery, while Roman usages are subjected to the test of primitive Christianity. The work reveals how effectively Du Pinet could transfer habits acquired in philological and encyclopaedic work into ecclesiastical controversy: antiquity had to be assembled, compared and made legible in support of a present institution. A surviving contemporary library catalogue records the book in duodecimo, emphasizing the portable form in which such confessional argument circulated.

Still more aggressive was the Taxe des parties casuelles de la boutique du pape, likewise issued in 1564 and signed only A. D. P. The book printed Latin and French texts relating to the notorious tradition of Roman chancery and penitentiary tariffs and surrounded them with annotations drawn from decretals, councils and canon law. Its title deliberately converts papal administration into a commercial “shop,” making financial language itself part of the polemic. Yet the work should not be described simplistically as the unmediated publication of a single authentic Roman tariff. Du Pinet selected and organized material belonging to a complicated textual tradition, translated it, recalculated or explained payments, and provided documentary annotation so that the book could function as evidence in a Protestant indictment of ecclesiastical venality. Madeleine Lazard’s analysis has shown how closely this apparently sensational pamphlet belongs to Du Pinet’s wider scholarly habits. Polemic and erudition were not opposites: the credibility of the attack depended precisely upon bilingual presentation, citation and documentary apparatus.

The Taxe enjoyed a long controversial afterlife. It was reprinted and reused by later Protestant writers attacking the Roman penitentiary and chancery, and the BnF records another edition in 1607. Its persistence demonstrates a different mode of textual survival from that of the Pliny. The natural-historical translation endured because it remained useful as an encyclopaedic reference; the Taxe endured because it could be repeatedly reactivated within confessional controversy. Du Pinet’s bibliography thus includes texts whose later lives depended upon radically different reading communities even though they shared the same fundamental editorial method: assemble authorities, translate them, annotate them, and reorganize them for a new purpose.

The final phase of his work returned emphatically to natural knowledge. In 1566 appeared his French translation of Levinus Lemnius’s De occultis naturae miraculis as Les secrets miracles de nature, printed in Lyon under the name of Jean Frellon, with the colophon identifying Jean d’Ogerolles as printer on 10 August 1566. The book brought Lemnius’s medical, physiological and natural observations into French and included extensive indexes. If Du Pinet had indeed died shortly before the second Pliny of the same year appeared, the Lemnius must represent work completed before his death and brought through the press posthumously or during his last months.

Also in 1566 appeared the second impression of Du Pinet’s French Mattioli, Les Commentaires ... sur les six livres ... de Dioscoride, described bibliographically as “reveue & augmentée de nouveau.” The continuing demand for this translation and its later reuse are important evidence for Du Pinet’s role in the French natural-historical book. His language did not disappear when new botanical observations and illustrations were added; publishers treated the translation as a textual foundation capable of supporting subsequent enlargement. By 1572 the widow of Gabriel Cotier could still market Mattioli in French under Du Pinet’s name, even as the underlying scientific work continued to evolve.

Du Pinet’s career is therefore best understood neither as that of a theologian who later abandoned religion for science nor as that of a miscellaneous compiler who happened to translate whatever the Lyon market demanded. The continuity is more substantial. In Geneva he translated and rearranged Reformation theology for vernacular readers; in Lyon he did the same for Dioscorides through Mattioli, Pliny, chorography, medical marvels and Italian prose. Across these subjects his characteristic operations remain remarkably stable: collation, translation, selection, abbreviation, annotation, indexing, explanation of technical terms and restructuring for readers who did not possess the linguistic or specialist equipment required by the source texts.

His printing history makes that continuity materially visible. Jean Girard’s Geneva produced the compact Protestant books of 1539, 1543 and 1545; Gabriel Cotier became central to the great botanical enterprises of 1561; Claude Senneton financed and issued the monumental French Pliny of 1562 and its revised successor; Jean d’Ogerolles printed the Plantz and participated in the production of the Lemnius translation; Jean Frellon provided another important Lyonese commercial connection. Du Pinet’s intellectual biography can therefore be reconstructed partly as a sequence of collaborations with different printing houses. The movement from Geneva to Lyon was not merely geographical. It carried him from a comparatively specialized Reformed publishing environment into a book economy capable of transforming his skills into large-scale vernacular scholarship.

His use of the designation “sieur de Noroy” in the Lyonese books similarly belongs to this transformation of authorial identity. The early Genevan Antoine Pignet often appears anonymously or discreetly, his name confined to a dedicatory epistle or absent from the title page; the later translator of Pliny and compiler of the Plantz presents himself much more visibly as Antoine Du Pinet, seigneur de Noroy. The difference should not be romanticized into a deliberate reinvention for which no personal manifesto survives, but print undoubtedly altered the public form of his name. The Protestant corrector whose authorship had been obscured by confessional circumstances became the named scholarly mediator advertised on substantial commercial publications.

The most striking example remains the contrast between the 1539 Apocalypse and the 1562 Histoire du monde. The first compresses learned Protestant exegesis into a small French octavo for readers requiring doctrinal guidance. The second opens the thirty-seven books of Pliny to French readers in two great folio volumes, furnished with marginalia, indexes and systems of equivalence between ancient and modern knowledge. Superficially they could scarcely be more different. Editorially they are products of the same intelligence. Du Pinet’s recurrent question was how an inherited body of difficult knowledge could be reorganized so that a new readership might actually use it.

This capacity explains why his contribution to Renaissance culture exceeds the originality of any single doctrine. He did not rival Calvin as a theologian, Mattioli as a botanist or Münster as a cosmographer, nor did he claim to. His historical importance lies in the space between such authors and their readers. He translated, compressed, compared and reconfigured. His Apocalypse converted Latin and medieval exegesis into French confessional reading; the Historia plantarum reduced the enormous botanical tradition surrounding Dioscorides and Mattioli to a portable illustrated repertory; the French Pliny converted an ancient encyclopaedia into a work navigable by sixteenth-century artisans, physicians and educated vernacular readers; and the Plantz assembled the visual and textual geography of many earlier authorities into a single French chorographical book.

The uncertainty surrounding his death paradoxically illuminates the strength of this editorial legacy. If, as the 1566 Pliny title page strongly suggests, Du Pinet died shortly before that edition appeared, then several of the books through which his name remained most visible were already entering posthumous circulation almost immediately. Publishers continued to issue his Mattioli, his Pliny and his controversial writings without requiring the continued presence of their translator. The attribution of death in 1584, still repeated in modern authority records, should therefore no longer be accepted without reservation; the contemporary publishing evidence makes 1565–1566 the more defensible chronology.

Antoine Du Pinet consequently stands at an unusually revealing intersection of the French Reformation, the Lyon book trade, Renaissance translation, natural history, medicine and cosmography. His career links Calvin’s Geneva with the presses of Senneton, Cotier, Frellon and d’Ogerolles; Protestant apocalypse commentary with Plinian encyclopaedism; clandestine or semi-anonymous religious publication with monumental signed folios; and learned Latin traditions with increasingly ambitious French readerships. The apparent diversity of his books is therefore deceptive. Their unity lies in a sustained practice of mediation: taking knowledge embedded in another language, another confession, another historical period or another specialist discipline and constructing the textual machinery through which it could circulate anew. In the history of sixteenth-century printing, Du Pinet matters precisely because translation, compilation and editorial design were for him forms of intellectual authorship.