Gaston Paris (Avenay-Val-d’Or 1839 – Cannes 1903) was a French Romance philologist. He studied in Germany (Bonn and Göttingen). A linguist and a fine connoisseur of Latin and French mediaeval literature, Gaston Paris, together with Paul Meyer, gave an important impulse to the study of mediaeval literature in France and produced many editions. One of his students was Joseph Bédier. As Reeve 1998 convincingly showed, Paris can rightly be considered the first philologist who consistently applied and explained the common errors method, and the one who introduced the method of Lachmann in France. His 1872 edition of several versions of the French mediaeval hagiographical poem “Vie de Saint Alexis” (11th - 14th century) is methodologically exemplary. In his introduction to the edition, he distinguishes between “critique des leçons” (analysis of variants) and “critique des formes” (analysis of forms). Indeed, mediaeval copyists may transmit the readings from the exemplar they were copying and leave them semantically intact, while they might transform, more or less considerably, their “forms” (i.e. their instantiations into another stage of the history of the language). This distinction remains fundamental.
By Paris
– Paris, Gaston, and Léopold Panier, eds. 1872. La vie de saint Alexis: Poème du XIe siècle et renouvellements des XIIe, XIIIe, et XIVe siècles. Bibliothèque de l'École des hautes études. Sciences philologiques et historiques. Paris: A. Franck. – Repr. Genève: Slatkine, 1974.
On Paris
– Bähler, Ursula. 2004. Gaston Paris et la philologie romane. Publications romanes et françaises, vol. 234. Genève: Droz.
– Bähler, Ursula, and Alain Corbellari, eds. 2009. Gaston Paris – Joseph Bédier: Correspondance. L’Europe des philologues, Correspondance, vol. 1. Firenze: Edizioni del Galluzzo (SISMEL).
– Croiset, Maurice. 1904. “Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Gaston Paris.” Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 48 (1): 66–112.
– Duval, Frédéric. 2006. "La philologie française, pragmatique avant tout? L’édition des textes médiévaux français en France." In Pratiques philologiques en Europe: Actes de la journée d’études organisée à l’École des Chartes le 23 septembre 2005, études réunies par Frédéric Duval, 115–150. Études et rencontres de l’École des Chartes, vol. 21. Paris: École des Chartes.
– Reeve, Michael. 1998. “Shared innovations, dichotomies, and evolution.” In Filologia classica e filologia romanza: Esperienze ecdotiche a confronto. Atti del Convegno Roma 25–27 maggio 1995, edited by Anna Ferrari, 445–505. Incontri di Studio, vol. 2. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo.
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