Jacques Pelletier du Mans

Who was Jacques Pelletier du Mans?

Jacques Pelletier du Mans, also spelled Peletier, in Latin: Peletarius, was a humanist, poet and mathematician of the French Renaissance.

Born at Le Mans into a bourgeois family, he studied at the Collège de Navarre where his brother Jean was a professor of mathematics and philosophy. He subsequently studied law and medicine, frequented the literary circle around Marguerite of Navarre and from 1541-43 was secretary to René du Bellay. In 1541 he published the first French translation of Horace's Ars poetica and during this period he also published numerous scientific and mathematical treatises.

In 1547 he produced a funeral oration for Henry VIII of England and published his first poems "Œuvres poétiques", which included translations from the first two cantos of Homer's Odyssey and the first book of Virgil's Georgics, twelve Petrarchian sonnets, three Horacian odes and a Martial-like epigram; this poetry collection also included the first published poems of Joachim Du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard. He then began to frequent a humanist circle around Théodore de Bèze, Jean Martin, Denis Sauvage.