This article may require
cleanup to meet Wikipedia's
quality standards. The specific problem is: This article contains several external links within the article body, a technique that was deprecated on Wikipedia several years ago; please help by removing these links, and replacing with an {item}<ref> style instead. Please help
improve this article if you can.(August 2021) (
Learn how and when to remove this template message)
3 September 1880 (1880-09-04) (aged 78) Châtellerault
Nationality
French
Signature
Marie-Félicité Brosset (24 January 1802 – 3 September 1880) was a French
orientalist who specialized in
Georgian and
Armenian studies. He worked mostly in
Russia.
Early life and first works
Marie-Félicité[1] Brosset was born in Paris into the family of a poor merchant, who died a few months after his birth. His mother destined him to the Church. He attended the theological seminaries in
Orléans, where he studied
Greek,
Latin,
Hebrew, and
Arabic.[citation needed]
From 1826 he devoted himself to the Armenian and Georgian languages, as well as their history and culture. He had finally found his true vocation. Books, texts, teachers, and documents were all scarce, however. For his work in Armenian, he was helped by
Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin.[3] For his Georgian work, he had to create his own dictionary from the Georgian translation of the Bible, which was faithful to the Greek text.[citation needed]
Russia
Invited to
Saint Petersburg in 1837 by the president of the
Imperial Academy of Sciences, Count
Sergey Uvarov, Brosset was elected a member a year later. He journeyed to the
Caucasus in 1847–48. Brosset translated—and commented on—the major medieval and
early-modern Georgian chroniclers. He published his work in seven volumes from 1849 to 1858. His
magnum opus, Histoire de la Géorgie, was a long-standing authority on the history of Georgia.[4] Brosset also published the correspondence between the
czars and the
kings of Georgia that occurred from 1639 to 1770.[5]
From 1861 to 1868, Brosset focused on his series regarding Armenian historians, but continued to work on them until 1876. Brosset wrote over 250 works on Georgian and Armenian history and culture overall.
Brosset left Russia in May 1880 and retired to his daughter's residence in
Châtellerault. He died there several months later, on 3 September.[6] His son, Laurent, contributed heavily to the knowledge of his life and works.[citation needed]
Works
Lists of works
Brosset, Laurent. Bibliographie analytique — 271 titles, not counting supplements. Alphabetical index: p. 585-704
Histoire de la Géorgie depuis l'Antiquité jusqu'au XIXe siècle, Introduction, CCXIV p., and Tables of contents, XCVI p., Saint Petersburg:
Académie impériale des sciences, 1858.
Collection d'historiens arméniens: dix ouvrages sur l'histoire de l'Arménie et des pays adjacents du Xe au XIXe siècle, reprinted by APA-Philo Press, 1978
ISBN9060223489.
Notes and references
^Then as now these two first names were almost always female.[clarification needed] In Russia, he is often called Марий Иванович Броссе, Marius Ivanovitch Brosset.
^Saint-Martin died of cholera in 1832 during the
second pandemic. Brosset, who loved him much, wrote his
obituary.
^"Brosset's Histoire was a sensational breakthrough. But from our vantage a century and a half later, it is not without shortcomings. Today we know that Brosset's edition is based exclusively upon a few MSS of the Vaxtangiseuli recension. We can hardly fault Brosset on this point [...]" Rapp, Stephen H. Studies in medieval Georgian historiography: early texts and Eurasian contexts, p. 31, at
Google Books, Peeters Publishers, 2003
ISBN9789042913189
Rapp, Stephen H. Studies in medieval Georgian historiography: early texts and Eurasian contexts, Peeters Publishers, 2003, 522 p.
ISBN9789042913189(in English)