AUBIGNAC, FRANC OIS HEDELIN, ABBE D' (I 604 1676), French author, was born in Paris. His father practised at the Paris bar, and his mother was a daughter of the great surgeon Ambroise Pare. Francois Hedelin took holy orders, was appointed tutor to one of Richelieu's nephews, and received through his pupil's influence the abbeys of Aubignac and of Mainac. In 1646 he retired to Nemours, occupying himself with literature till his death. He took an energetic share in the literary controversies of his time. Against Gilles Ménage he wrote a Terence justifie (1656); he laid claim to having orig inated the idea of the "Carte de tendre" of Mlle. de Scudery's Clelie; and after being a professed admirer of Corneille he turned against him because he had neglected to mention the abbe in his Discours sur le poeme dramatique. He was the author of four mediocre tragedies : La Cyminde (1642), La Pucelle d'Orleans (1642), Zenobie (1647) and Le Martyre de Sainte Catherine (1650). Zenobie was written with the intention of affording a model in which the strict rules of the drama, as understood by the theorists, were observed. In the choice of subjects for his plays, he seems to have been guided by a desire to illustrate the various kinds of tragedy—patriotic, antique and religious. It is as a theorist that d'Aubignac still arrests attention. Jean Chape lain was the first to establish the convention of the unities that plays so large a part in the history of the French stage ; but the laws of dramatic method and construction generally were codified by d'Aubignac in his Pratique du theatre. The book was only published in 1657, but had been begun at the desire of Richelieu as early as 1640. His Conjectures academiques sur l'Iliade d'Homere, published nearly forty years after his death, threw doubts on the existence of Homer, and anticipated to some extent the conclusions of Friedrich August Wolf in his Prolegomena ad Homerum BIBLIOGRAPHY. See G. Saintsbury, Hist. of Criticism, bk. v., and Bibliography. See G. Saintsbury, Hist. of Criticism, bk. v., and H. Rigault, Hist. de la querelle des anciens et modernes (1859) . The contents of the Pratique du Theatre are summarized by F. Brunetiere in his notice of Aubignac in the Grande Encyclopedie.