1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Meyer, Paul Hyacinthe

3692331911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 18 — Meyer, Paul Hyacinthe

MEYER, [MARIE] PAUL HYACINTHE (1840–), French philologist, was born in Paris on the 17th of January 1840. He was educated at the École des Chartes, and in 1863 was attached to the manuscript department of the Bibliothèque Nationale. In 1876 he became professor of the languages and literatures of southern Europe at the Collège de France. In 1882 he was made director of the École des Chartes, and a year later was nominated a member of the Academy of Inscriptions. He was one of the founders of the Revue critique, and a founder and the chief contributor to Romania (1872). Paul Meyer began with the study of old Provençal literature, but subsequently did valuable work in many different departments of romance literature, and ranks as the chief modern authority on the French language. He is the author of Rapports sur les documents manuscrits de l’ancienne littérature de la France conservés dans les bibliothèques de la Grande Bretagne (1871); Recueil d’anciens textes bas-latins, provençaux et français (2 parts, 1874–1876); Alexandre le Grand dans la littérature française du moyen age (2 vols., 1886). He edited a great number of old French texts for the Société des anciens textes français, the Société de l’histoire de France and independently. Among these may be mentioned Aye d’Avignon (1861), with Guessard; Flamença (1865); the Histoire of Guillaume le Maréchal (3 vols., 1892–1902); Raoul de Cambrai (1882), with A. Longnon; Fragments d’une vie da Saint Thomas de Cantorbéry (1885); Guillaume de la Barre (1894).