DOLET, ETIENNE French scholar and printer, was born at Orleans. After studying at Paris and Padua, he became secretary in 153o to the bishop of Limoges, who was French ambassador to the republic of Venice. He then studied law at Toulouse. In 1535 he entered the lists against Erasmus in the famous Ciceronian controversy, by publishing a Dialogus de imitations Ciceroniana; and the following year saw his Commen tariolum linguae Latinae. This work was dedicated to Francis I., who gave him the privilege of printing during ten years any works in Latin, Greek, Italian or French, which were the product of his own pen or had received his supervision ; and accordingly, on his release from an imprisonment occasioned by his justifiable homi cide of a painter named Compaing, he began at Lyons his typo graphical and editorial labours. He started by publishing a Cato christianus, or Christian moralist, in which he made profession of his creed. The catholicity of his literary appreciation, in spite of his ultra-Ciceronianism, was soon displayed by the works which proceeded from his press—ancient and modern, sacred and secu lar, from the New Testament in Latin to Rabelais in French. After being thrice imprisoned for atheism, he was tortured and burnt at Paris on Aug. 3, 1546. On his way to the stake, he is said to have composed the punning pentameter—Non dolet ipse Dolet, sed pia turba dolet.
Whether Dolet was a Protestant or an anti-Christian rationalist is debatable. He was condemned by Calvin but many of his books were of a religious character, and he repeatedly advocated the reading of the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue.
See A. F. Didot, Essai sur la typographie (1852) ; L. Michel, Dolet (1889) ; R. C. Christie, Etienne Dolet, the Martyr of the Renaissance (2nd ed. 1889, bibl.) ; 0. Galtier, Etienne Dolet (1908), and pt. 3 of J. C. Dawson's Toulouse in the Renaissance (New York, 1923).