1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Sirmond, Jacques

SIRMOND, JACQUES (1559-1651), French scholar and Jesuit, was born at Riom, Auvergne, on the 12th or the 22nd of October 1559. He was educated at the Jesuit College of Billom; having been a novice at Verdun and then at Pont-à-Mousson, he entered into the order on the 26th of July 1576. After having taught rhetoric at Paris he resided for a long time in Rome as secretary to R. P. Aquaviva (1590-1608); in 1637 he was confessor to Louis XIII. He died on the 7th of October 1651. Father Sirmond was a most industrious scholar, and his criticisms were as enlightened as was possible for a man living in those times. He brought out many editions of Latin and Byzantine chroniclers of the middle ages: Ennodius and Flodoard (1611), Sidonius Apollinaris (1614), the life of St Leo IX. by the archdeacon Wibert (1615), Marcellinus and Idatius (1619), Anastasius the librarian (1620), Eusebius of Caesarea (1643), Hincmar (1645), Hrabanus Maurus (1647), Rufinus and Loup de Ferrières (1650), &c., and above all his edition of the capitularies of Charles the Bald (Karoli Calvi et successorum aliquot Franciae regum capitula, 1623) and of the councils of ancient France (Concilia antiquae Galliae, 1629, 3 vols., new ed. incomplete, 1789). An essay in which he denies the identity of St Denis of Paris and St Denis the Areopagite (1641), caused a very lively controversy from which his opinion came out victorious. His Opera varia, where this essay is to be found, as well as a description in Latin verse of his voyage from Paris to Rome in 1590, have appeared in 5 vols. (1696; new ed. Venice, 1728). To him is attributed, and no doubt correctly, Elogio di cardinale Baronio (1607).

See the Bibliothèque des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus by Father Carlos Sommervogel, tome vii. (1896).