Lire Homère à la Renaissance: philologie humaniste et tradition grecque : sur les traces de Vettor Fausto et de Guillaume Budé

Notes affixed by Vettor Fausto and Guillaume Budé on their personal copy of Homer's editio princeps constitute two remarkable examples of the reading of the poet in the first decades of the XVIth century. The edition, the analysis, the interpretation of this set of notes, stemming largely from two exceptional sources, the famous Venetus A and an unknown rivalling source, are the foundation and the material of this thesis. From the examination of a thousand notes, the study attempts to understand the philological approach of both humanists. Considering that a certain philosophy of history, marked by the idea of progress and historicism, biases our understanding of the philological work of the humanists, the research reverses the historical perspective by taking, for point of comparison, the approach of the antique philology, in particular that of the scholars of the Hellenistic era : the Alexandrine empeiria. The thesis concludes that the underlying interpretative model to the criticism of the humanist philology is a matter for a paradigm which it is advisable to question in order to better understand the reading of an author such as Homer in the Renaissance.