Sponde, Jean de (1557-95). French humanist and poet. Brought up as a Calvinist, he was given a humanist education and visited Basle, famous for its learning and its toleration. He was personally acquainted with Henri de Navarre (later Henri IV) and held various public offices. When Henri IV was converted to Catholicism (1594) Sponde followed suit, and was violently attacked by leading Huguenots such as Bèze and d'Aubigné. He acquired a reputation as a humanist scholar, publishing Latin translations of Homer (1583) and Hesiod (1592) together with commentaries. His French works include a set of prose meditations on four psalms (1588), designed for the personal use of Henri de Navarre, but he is best known for his slender but striking collections of lyric verse: the Amours, published posthumously (c. 1598), and the Essai de poèmes chrétiens, published with the psalm meditations. The Christian poems (twelve sonnets and a longer poem on death; a poem on the Eucharist) bear traces of Sponde's Calvinism; they also belong to a broader revival of devotional poetry in this period [see Chassignet; La Ceppède; Favre]. Sponde's poetry was ‘discovered’ in 1930 by the critic Alan Boase, who judged it comparable with contemporary English metaphysical poetry.
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