JEAN

See also:

• JEAN MOLINET (1433-1507)

MOLINET (1433-1507)  , French poet and chronicler, was born at Desvres (Pas de Calais) . In 1475 he succeeded Georges Chastellain as historiographer of the house of Burgundy, and Margaret of Austria, governor of the Low Countries, made him her librarian . His continuation of Chastellain's chronicle, which covers the years from 1474 to 1504, remained unpublished until 1828 when it was edited (Paris, 5 vols.) by J . A . Buchon . It is far from possessing the historical value of his predecessor's work . A selection from his voluminous poetical works was published at Paris in 1531, Les Faictz et Dietz de feu . . . Jehan Molinet .... He also translated the Roman de la rose into prose (pr . Lyons, 1503) . He became, in 1501, canon of the church of Notre-Dame at Valenciennes, where he died on the 23rd of August 1507 .

He is noteworthy as the

head of the vicious Burgundian school of poetry known as the rhetoriqueurs, characterized by the excessive use of puns and of puerile metrical devices . His chief disciple was his nephew, Guillaume Cretin (d . 1525), ridiculed by Rabelais as Raminagrobis, and Jean Lemaire des Belges was his friend . See A . Wauters in the Biographie rationale de Belgique (vol. xv., 1899) .