Paul Sabatier

Paul Sabatier (1858-1928) was a French Protestant pastor and historian who trained under Ernest Renan and published a critical edition of the Didache in 1885, well before he turned to Francis. He brought out Vie de S. François d'Assise at his own expense in November 1893, and it made him famous almost at once: the French Academy crowned it, the Vatican placed it on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1894, and it ran past forty editions in his lifetime. He spent the rest of his career among the medieval sources, discovering and publishing the Speculum Perfectionis in 1898, though his early dating of that text has not survived later scholarship. He is a different man from his contemporary Paul Sabatier, the Nobel-winning chemist.