Jean Tarde

Jean Tarde (1561 or 1562 to 1636) was vicar general of Sarlat, famous for his chronicles of the diocese, a Frenchman and an early adopter of Copernican theory. He was born into a moderately wealthy bourgeois family at La Roque-Gageac near Sarlat, in what was then Guyenne, and died there. He took a doctorate of law at the University of Cahors and then studied at Paris, becoming an expert in the mathematical sciences. In his younger life he held several religious posts, as curate of Carves, theological canon of the cathedral of Sarlat and almoner, and spent his leisure on mathematics, astronomy, physics and geography. A love of antiquities took him on long journeys in southeastern France in 1591 to 1594 and to Rome, where in 1593 he met the antiquarian Fulvio Orsini and the mathematician Christoph Clavius. When the cathedral archives were destroyed in the Wars of Religion he was put in charge of reconstituting them. He is most famous for his work on sunspots, which he concluded were small satellites of the sun.