The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (review)

Jean Bodin’s Universae naturae theatrum (1596) is the least celebrated of all the major publications by this outstanding figure of the French renaissance. It lacks the apparent political, historiographical, and philosophical relevance of Bodin’s well-known earlier works (the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem of 1566, Les six livres de la République of 1576, and De la démonomanie des sorciers of 1580, all receiving much more attention then as now). Ann Blair focuses our attention on the Theatrum, as a text whose significance for her book exists on at least three interrelated levels: there is its relation to Bodin’s views in the more famous texts; its advantage as a treatise on natural philosophy about whose author we know much more (intellectually) than those of most such works; and in connection with the last, there is above all its value as a distinguished representative of a genre of natural philosophical writings that was prominent in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

It is the third consideration that motivates Blair’s book most centrally. She declares her wish to enrich our view of the history of science with works, like the Theatrum, that were not made by subsequently regarded stars such as Galileo or Descartes; the very typicality of its genre makes the Theatrum, she argues, a valuable window on contemporary understandings of what natural knowledge was and should be about. Bodin’s enterprise possessed a religious core: natural philosophy was for him a tool to be used in shoring up broadly irenical positions (of the kind associated with the Colloquium heptaplomeres, usually attributed, as here, to Bodin). This kind of “natural theology” avant la lettre characterized a good number of different thinkers and writers on natural philosophy in this period, many of them German (besides their discussion here, Blair is considering such people, and their project of pia philosophia, more fully in her current work). It is a subject that, more than anything, stands at the heart of her study.

Bodin, rather conventionally, tried to establish a close liaison between natural philosophy and religious knowledge—that is, between those things to be inferred from experience of the natural world and the central dogmas of faith. Less conventionally, he attempted to demonstrate on occasion truths that were far from orthodox. Regardless of whether Bodin was “really” a Catholic or a Protestant (and Blair observes the great interest in the Theatrum shown by German Calvinists in the first few decades after its original publication), his general religious stance was one of accommodation. Thus good philosophizing could demonstrate (in the weak, rhetorical sense of that term) such doctrines as the existence and providence of God; contentious issues, such as the correct interpretation of the Eucharist, were left aside. Nonetheless, Bodin also argued, at such length and with such vigor as to have the propositions condemned by the Catholic church, that human souls and angels (as well as, more usually, demons) were corporeal beings. The importance to Bodin of this position stemmed from its sociopolitical implications: in particular, if human souls were incorporeal, it became unclear how rewards and punishments—necessary sanctions for restoring the social order threatened by the Wars of Religion—could be meted out after death. Curiously, such a view seems to imply that pleasure and pain are inextricably connected to bodies alone.

Among the historiographical strands informing Blair’s approach is recent literature on the “history of the book,” best known through the work of Roger Chartier. Accordingly, Blair discusses the vicissitudes of production of Bodin’s book in its various editions and emissions, and carefully considers, along with the likely reading practices by the aid of which Bodin came to compose it, the various uses to which its first readers put it. Her major interpretive trope is that of the commonplace book. While acknowledging the lack of direct material evidence for Bodin’s use of such a technique as his chief means of...