L’apport de Nicot et Ménage au « Tresor de Recherches et Antiquitez gauloises et françoises » de Pierre Borel

Antonella Amatuzzi, examines a seventeenth-century text, Pierre Borel’s Tresor de recherches et antiquitez gauloises et françoises of 1655. This learned antiquarian work might be seen as half-way between a dictionary and an encyclopedia (as might, for instance, some of the dictionaries discussed by Linda Mitchell in Chapter Six). Among the four hundred primary and secondary sources on which it draws are the general French dictionary of Jean Nicot and the etymological dictionary of Gilles Ménage. These two sources are, as Amatuzzi shows, by no means pervasively present in Borel’s work: perhaps one entry in thirty (two hundred or so in a total of 6300), cites one or the other. But they are important as models; and the flexible use which Borel makes of them, abbreviating or supplementing as his material requires, exemplifies the interplay between his semi-encyclopedic work and that of earlier writers in a more purely lexicographical tradition. That interplay continued as Borel’s Trésor was used in the revision of Ménage’s dictionary which was published in 1694. Amatuzzi concludes with the point that the textual relationships she unpacks bear witness to the liveliness of lexicographical exchange in seventeenth-century France, and to the dynamism of the dictionary text.