Pierre Bersuire

Born at Saint-Pierre-du-Chemin, in the area of Vendée in Poitou, he entered monastic orders in his youth rather than take a university degree.

He remained in Avignon for 12 years as a protégé of the papal vice-chancellor Cardinal Pierre des Prés (Peter de Pratis), bishop of Praeneste.

In the 1350s, at the command of John II of France, Bersuire translated Petrarch's reassembly of Livy's Latin history of Rome, Ab urbe condita, into French.

Bersuire spent the last dozen years of his life as Prior of St. Eligius (Saint-Éloi) (from 1354), on the Île de la Cité, close to Notre-Dame.

The Repertorium proved to be one of the most popular books of its kind and was frequently printed first at Cologne in 1477, and again at Nuremberg (1489), Lyon (1517), Paris (1521), Venice (1589), Antwerp (1609), etc.

Detail of Pierre Bersuire at work, from his translation of Titus Livius , Ab urbe condita , fourteenth century