Louis Sebastien Le Nain De Tillemont
Louis Sebastien Le Nain De Tillemont [1]
a French divine and scholar, was born in Paris, Nov. 30, 1637, and at the age of ten years entered the famous seminary of Port-Royal. He soon manifested great proficiency in the study of history, and at the age of eighteen began to read the fathers, the lives of the apostles, and their successors in the primitive Church, and drew up for himself an account of early ecclesiastical history, an the manner of Usher's Annals. When twenty- three, he entered the Episcopal seminary at Beauvais, where he remained three or four years, and then went to reside with Godefroi Hermant, a canon of the Cathedral of Beauvais, with whom he remained five or six years he then returned to Paris, and, after receiving the other orders of the Church, was ordained priest in 1676, and settled at Tillemont, whence he took his name. About this time he was employed, along with M. de Sacy, on a Life of St. Louis, and two years after traveled in Flanders and Holland. Returning, he continued his studies, and in 1690 began to publish his History of the Emperors. To a complete knowledge of ecclesiastical history he joined an exemplary humility and regularity of conduct; and, regardless of dignities, wished for nothing but retirement. The practicing of watchings and austerities brought upon him a disease, of which he died Jan. 10, 1698. He published, Lives of the Emperors (1690-1701, 5 vols. 4to ): — M1emoires pour servir al'Histoire Ecclesiastique des six premiers Sicles, etc. (1693, 16 vols. 4to): — and supplied materials for several works published by others: Life of St. Louis, begun by De Sacy and finished and published by La Chaise; Lives of St. Athanasius and St. Basil, Toby G. Hermant; Lives of Tertullian and Origen, by Forse, under the name of La Mothe He left in MS. a Memoir concerning William de Saint- Amour, and the Disputes between the Dominicans and the University : — Lie of Isabella, sister of St. Louis: — Remarks on the Breviavries of Mans and Paris : — A Legend for the Breviary of Evreux: — and History of the Sicilian Kings of Anjou.
