Abstract EN:

During the first half of the Sixteenth century, the city of Lyon is characterised by a cultural dynamism due to an intellectual active circle driven by authors visiting the city or native to Lyon. By collecting and analysing the various traces left by the intellectual activities of the jurist native from the Monts du Lyonnais Benoît Court, this study aims at documenting this circle’s activities from a singular and novel perspective. Reconstructing the biography and the network of the jurist gives an understanding of his position in this erudite circle and particularly in the Sodalitium lugdunense, the humanist network of Lyon, during the 1530’ and of his connections with well-known figures like Symphorien Champier, Étienne Dolet or neo-latin poets. Some traces of his activities – books buying and publication of his own works of course, but also advice for publication – in the printing shops of Sébastien Gryphe, the Frellon brothers and Jean de Tournes have been collected. Benoît Court spent time with this erudite society and in printing shops, but he also published, probably encouraged by the intellectual competition which reigned there, three works in Lyon in the space of thirteen years. A legal commentary, the first one testifies to his author’s skills in law and also to his positioning at the heart of the hermeneutic renewal driven by the application of humanist methods in the legal scope. It is a commentary designed for law students or practitioners which also represent an eloquent exemple of wellread law as lauded by legal humanism. The great culture and the vast knowledge invested by Benoît Court in his works tallies with the ideal of the « perfect jurist », perfectus iurisconsultus, which is developping at the Renaissance. But Court’s work is also marked out by his uncommon literary inventiveness. Indeed, he diverts the legal commentary’s classic form by applying the paradoxical aesthetic of the serio ludere inherited from Antiquity. By seriously playing, the jurist shows a great inventiveness and offers an unheard commentary’s form. Benoît Court’s portrait as a « perfect jurist » is complemented by the reconstruction of his private library. An investigative work has permitted to collect bibliographical and material data of two hundred items divided into eighty five volumes ; it brings to light an encyclopaedic collection who must have been among the most important private libraries at this time in Lyon. In addition to helping us understand the owner’s intellectual interests, it turned out to be an invaluable source of material to a better knowledge of the Lyonnaise printing and binding’s world as well as the comprehension of books’ movement in Europe.