R. seems to have been what in French could be called an ‘éditeur scientific’, and in English, somewhat more bluntly, a ‘publishers’ hack’. We have not found any of the editions on which he is said to have worked online, so we rely here on the fullest of the descriptions that we have been able to find in WorldCat, supported, as we discovered after we had written it, by a recently published article about him: R. Menini,‘“R. F.” (et non “F. R.”): De François Rabelais à Raymond Fraguier’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 75 (2013) 515-522. So far as we can tell, he appears first in Denis de Harsy’s edition of the consilia of Étienne Bernard (2 vols., Lyon 1531, 1532). He is there described as ‘iurisstudiosus’, presumably a law student, and what he did on the edition is described as ‘concinnator’, a word that at least classically means ‘hair dresser’. In 1533, Simon Vincent and Harsy published in Lyon Andrea da Isernia’s lecturaon the Neapolitan constitutions, which they called Peregrina lectura, and in which they urged the reader: ‘en damus tibi lector optime peregrina Comentaria D. Andrææ ab Isernia inter classicos LL. autores jure supremi: quæ qde sparsim & circuncise in Constitutiones Neapolitani regni maxima studiorum tuorum comoditate ædidit : Sed hac tandem accipe Peregrina ab exotico habitu exutam, & novo dotata ornatu opera Remudi Fragrier. I.S. qui illam suis vigiliis ex proselyta domestica tuam fecit’. (‘Proselyta here may mean ‘alien’). In Harsy’s edition of the Decisiones Neapolitani of Matteo D’Afflitto (Lyon 1533, repr. 1537), his work is described more conventionally as ‘[cum] sumarijs, titulis, additionibus & indice illustratum opera praesertim Remundi Fraguier Iuristudiosi’. To Vincent’s Aerarium constitutionum regni Siciliae he is said to have contributed an index, a table of Isernia’s Peregrina lectura, and a catalogue of the constitutions. To the Tabella of the decisions of D’Afflitto published by the heirs of S. Vincent (Lyon 1535), he is said to have contributed a digest. He made some contribution (not specified in the catalogue, probably the index) to the edition that the heirs of S. Vincent published (Lyon 1535) of Alberto Trotti’s De vero et perfecto clero (see Albertus de Ferrariis) and another unspecified contribution to A. Vincent’s edition of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (Lyon 1538). He wrote a poem to accompany the edition of Aulus Gellius that the heirs of S. Vincent published in 1539. In Tractatus 1549 and TUI 1584 (TUI 1584 t. 14), the only editions that we found of his Tractatus de religiosis sectis eorumque auctoribus, he is described as ‘legum professor’, but that may be publishers’ hyperbole. The work itself is not particularly legal, an attempt to list all the religious orders and types of committed religious life, from the beginnings of Christianity to his day. There can be little doubt that he was active between 1531 and 1539. Whether he was still alive and active in 1549 is a matter of more doubt, but it is certainly possible. That he was is suggested by the fact that he supplied a brief avis au lecteur to the edition in Tractatus 1549 of L’Esnauderie’s De privilegiis doctorum (TUI 1584 t. 18).

Source: Not in DHJF. CERL Thesaurus.

Entry by: CD 22.v.2019

TUI database