Cosmographical Novelties in French Renaissance Prose (1550-1630)
Dialectic and Discovery
By (author) Raphaele Garrod
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.
- By (author) Raphaele Garrod
Other Titles in this Series
Rhetoric, Persuasion, and Teaching the Emotions in the Early Modern English Sermon, 1600-1642
Volume 23
Inter-Ethnic Relations and the Functioning of Multi-Ethnic Societies
Cohesion in Multi-Ethnic Societies in Europe from c. 1000 to the Present, II
Volume 18
Republicanism, Sinophilia, and Historical Writing
Thomas Gordon (c.1691-1750) and his 'History of England'
Volume 4
Legal Norms and Political Action in Multi-Ethnic Societies
Cohesion in Multi-Ethnic Societies in Europe from c. 1000 to the Present, III
Volume 20
Memories in Multi-Ethnic Societies
Cohesion in Multi-Ethnic Societies in Europe from c. 1000 to the Present, I
Volume 15
Historiography and the Shaping of Regional Identity in Europe
Regions in Clio's Looking Glass
Volume 16
Sociability and its Discontents
Civil Society, Social Capital, and their Alternatives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Volume 1
Communicating the Passion
The Socio-Religious Function of an Emotional Narrative (1250-1530)
Volume 21
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