French poet, born at Lyons, where his father practised law. Besides following his fathers profession he was a painter, architect, musician and poet. He was the centre of the Lyonnese coterie that elaborated the theory of spiritual love, derived partly from Plato and partly from Petrarch, which was enunciated in Antoine Héroets Parfaicte Amye.
Scèves chief works are Délie, objet de plus haulte vertu (1544); two eclogues, Arion (1536) and La Saulsaye (1547); and Le Microcosme (1562), an encyclopædic poem beginning with the fall of man. Délie consists of 450 dizaines and about 50 other poems in praise of his mistress. These poems, now little read, were even in Scèves own day so obscure that his enthusiastic admirer Étienne Dolet confesses he could not understand them. Scève was a musician as well as a poet, and cared very much for the musical value of the words he used. In this and in his erudition he forms a link between the school of Marot and the Pléiade. Délie (an anagram for lidée) set the fashion of a series of poems addressed to a mistress real or imaginary, followed by Ronsard in Cassandre and by du Bellay in Olive. The Lyonnese school of which Scève was the leader included his friend Claude de Taillemont and many women writers of verse, Jeanne Gaillardeplaced by Marot on an equality with Christine de PisanPernette du Guillet, Clémence de Bourges and the poets sisters, Claudine and Sibylle Scève. Scève died in 1564. (See also Louise Labé).
See E. Bourciez, La Littérature polie et les murs de cour sous Henri II. (Paris, 1886); Pernetti, Recherches pour servir à lhistoire de Lyon (2 vols., Lyons, 1757); and F. Brunetière, Un Précurseur de la Pléïade, Maurice Scève, in his Études critiques, vol. vi. (1899).