Laudatio in Honorem Jacobi Dalaruni

Could there be a more auspicious day than 14 July on which to honor a French scholar? Though the idyllic setting of the Saint Bonaventure campus is far from the bustling Place de la Bastille, the date could hardly be more fitting for the recipient of the 2016 Franciscan Institute Medal, given Jacques Dalarun’s truly revolutionary contributions to Franciscan scholarship. Born in 1952, on All Saints’ Day, Jacques Dalarun worked his way up through the highly competitive French educational hierarchy, reaching the level of professeur certifié by 1974, agrégé d’histoire by 1975, doctor in medieval history by 1984, and habilité à diriger les recherches by 1994. During these years he taught first at the collège level from 1975 to 1984, and then, as his first books began to appear, at the Université de FrancheComté and the École française de Rome, where he was named Directeur des études médiévales in 1990. He was appointed Directeur de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in 1997, and served from 1998 to 2004 as Director of the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes. In 2013 his intellectual achievements were crowned with election to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and thus to the Institut de France. This is the curriculum vitae of a French scholar who has reached the very pinnacle of his profession. All of this success was founded on a string of brilliant studies, beginning in 1985 and 1986 with two ground-breaking volumes on Robert of Arbrissel, the twelfth-century founder of Fontevrault.1 In retrospect, the scholarly approach that has served Jacques so well ever since was already in evidence in these first books: Identify, edit, and translate important new texts; analyze them closely while bringing the reader along at every step; ask new questions, offer new arguments, and push forward the state of historical knowledge. Thus, Jacques was already a rising star in the French scholarly firmament by 1986, but his interest had not yet been caught by specifically