Martianay, John

, a Benedictine monk, who distinguished himself by an edition of St. Jerome, was born at St. Sever, a village in Gascony, in 1647. He entered into the congregation of St. Maur at twenty years of age; and applied himself to the study of the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages. He read lectures upon the holy scriptures in several monasteries, at x\rles, at Avignon, at Bourdeaux: in the last of which places he accidentally met with father Pezron’s book called “The antiquity of time re-established;” “L’Antiquite du temps retablie.” The authority of the Hebrew text, and the chronology of the Vulgate, being attacked in this work, Martianay resolved to defend them in two or three pieces, published against Pezron and Isaac Vossius, who maintained the Septuagint version. This monk died of an apoplexy in 1717, after having spent fifty years in a scrupulous observance of all the duties belonging to his order, and in writing more than twenty works, of which the most distinguished is his edition of the works of St. Jerome, in 5 vols. folio; the first of which was published at Paris in 1693, the second in 1699. In his notes on these two volumes he criticized several learned men, as well papists as protestants, with much severity, and even contumely; which | provoked Le Clerc, who was one of them, to examine the merits of this edition and of the editor. This he did in a volume published in 12mo, at Amsterdam, in 1700, with this title, “Quaestiones Hie,ronymianae, in qnibus expenditur Hieronymi nupera editio Parisina, &c.” in which he endeavours to shew that Martianay, notwithstanding the indecent petulances he had exercised towards other critics, had none of the requisites to qualify him for an editor of St. Jerome; that he had not a competent skill either in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages, or in the ancient interpreters of scripture, or in profane authors, or in the science of manuscripts, for this work. Martianay published the third volume in 1704, the fourth in 1705, and the fifth in 1706; and Le Clerc published, in the seventeenth tome of his “Bibliotheque choisee,” some copious remarks upon these three last volumes, in order to confirm the judgment he had passed on the two first. Nevertheless, Martianay’s edition of Jerome was by many thought the best, even after the appearance of Vallarsius’s edition. ¹