Cosmographical novelties in French Renaissance prose (1550-1630) : dialectic and discovery / by Raphaële Garrod.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Garrod, Raphaële, author.

Contributor:

Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

Series:

Early European research ; v. 9.

Early European research

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cosmology--History.

Cosmology.

History.

French prose literature--16th century--Themes, motives.

French prose literature.

French prose literature--17th century--Themes, motives.

Themes, motives.

Physical Description:

x, 389 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Turnhout, Belgium : Brepols, 2015.

Summary:

Early European Research is a series that explores how the social and intellectual history of pre-modern Europe both shapes and challenges contemporary Western society. Its publications considers issues such as; models of individual and collective identity; gender and power structures; conflict, peace and war; social capital and poverty; changing approaches to science and medicine, and ways of treating the environment and alien cultures. Contemporary historiography holds that it was the practices and technologies underpinning both the Great Voyages and the 'New Science', as opposed to traditional book learning, which led to the major epistemic breakthroughs of early modernity. This study, however, returns to the importance of book-learning by exploring how cosmological and cosmographical 'novelties' were explained and presented in Renaissance texts, and discloses the ways in which the reports presented by sailors, astronomers, and scientists became not only credible but also deeply disturbing for scholars, preachers, and educated laymen in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. It is argued here that dialectic-the art of argumentation and reasoning-played a crucial role in articulating and popularizing new learning about the cosmos by providing the argumentative toolkit needed to define, discard, and authorize novelties. The debates that shaped them were not confined to learned circles; rather, they reached a wider audience via early modern vernacular genres such as the essay. Focusing both on major figures such as Montaigne or Descartes, as well as on now-forgotten popularizers such as Belleforest and Binet, this book describes the deployment of dialectic as a means of articulating and disseminating, but also of containing, the disturbance generated by cosmological and cosmographical novelties in Renaissance France, whether for the lay reader in Court or Parliament, for the parishioner at Church, or for the student in the classroom. Book jacket.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Dialectic and Natural Philosophy: An Early Modern Panorama 37

Part I Cosmological Novelties: Natural-Theological, Sceptical, and Revolutionary Subversions

Chapter 2 Natural Theology and Cosmological Novelties: The Huguenot Encyclopaedia and the Jesuit Miscellany 101

Chapter 3 Cosmological Fictions: Sceptical and Revolutionary Uses of the Loci 151

Part II Cosmographical Novelties: Inventing the New World and National Geographies

Chapter 4 Early Modern Cosmography: Definitions and Tensions in Contemporary Scholarship 211

Chapter 5 The Locus from Authority in Cosmography and Geography 225

Chapter 6 Loci in Cosmography and Geography: Probable Disciplines. Defining Novelties, Inventing National Geographies 259.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

ISBN:

9782503550459

2503550452

OCLC:

904183132

Publisher Number:

99967613768