Denis Godefroy

DENIS GODEFROY (Dionysius Gothofredus) (1549-1622), jurist, son of Leon Godefroy, lord of Guignecourt, was born in Paris on Oct. and died at Strasbourg on Sept. 7, 1622. He studied law in the Low Countries and in Germany, and embraced Calvinism. This change of faith led to his residence abroad, first at Geneva, where he was professor of law, and then at Heidelberg, where he was head of the faculty of law and was employed from time to time on diplomatic missions by the Elector Palatine. His most important work was the Corpus juris civilis, originally pub lished at Geneva in 1583, which went through some 20 editions, the most valuable of them being that printed by the Elzevirs at Amsterdam in 1633 and the Leipzig edition of 1740.

Lists of his other learned works may be found in Senebier's

Hist. litt. de Geneve. vol. ii., and in Niceron's Memoires, vol. xvii. Some of his correspondence with his learned friends, with his kinsman President de Thou, Isaac Casaubon, Jean Jacques Grynaeus and others, is preserved in the libraries of the British Museum, of Basle and Paris.

His eldest son, THEODORE GODEFROY (158o-1649), was born at Geneva on July 14, 1580. He abjured Calvinism, and was called to the bar in Paris. He became historiographer of France in 1613 and was employed from time to time on diplomatic missions. He was employed at the congress of Munster, where he remained after the signing of peace in 1648 as charge d'affaires until his death on Oct. 5 of the next year. His most important work is Le Cere monial de France . . . (1619), a work which became a classic on the subject of royal ceremonial, and was re-edited by his son in an enlarged edition in He made vast collections of historical material which remains in ms. and fills the greater part of the Godefroy collection of over 500 portfolios in the Library of the Institute in Paris. These were catalogued by Ludovic Lalanne in the Annuaire Bulletin (1865-1866 and 1892) of the Societe de l'histoire de France.

The second son of Denis, JACQUES GODEFROY (1587-1652), jurist, was born at Geneva on Sept. 13, 1587. He was educated in France but returned to Geneva, where he held various important public offices. He died on June 23, 1652. He worked for 3o years on his edition of the Codex Theodosianus (Lyons, 4 vols. 1665, and Leipzig, 6 vols. 1736-45). This code formed the principal, though not the only, source of the legal systems of the countries formed from the Western Empire. Godefroy's edition became a standard authority on the decadent period of the Western Empire. Of his numerous other works the most important was the recon struction of the 12 tables of early Roman law.

See also the dictionary of Moreri, Niceron's Memoires (vol. 17) and a notice in the Bibliotheque universelle de Geneve (Dec. 1837).