Sous la leçon des vents: Le monde d'André Thevet, cosmographe de la Renaissance (review)

Frank Lestringant's most recent work, Sous la leçon des vents: Le monde d'André Thevet, cosmographe de la Renaissance, groups together essays on André Thévet (1516–92), cosmographer of the last Valois kings and author of books on cosmography and the new world, beginning with the Cosmographie de Levant (1554) and Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (1557, 1558), and culminating with La Cosmographie universelle (1575) and Le Grand Insulaire et Pilotage (ca. 1586–87). Still relatively unknown to Renaissance literary scholars, Thévet was in his time immensely fascinating to such leading lights as Gessner, Belon, Belleforest, Paré, Léry, and Aldrovandi, as well as to humanists and poets whose expanding universe obliged them to validate experience as against the received dogmas of Aristotle and of medieval Scholastic philosophers whose epistemologies remained closed to the varietas of new-world exploration. The book is splendidly written and includes copious notes, bibliographies, and indexes, as well as maps and engravings drawn from discovery narratives.

Lestringant has over the years invented a new epistemè within the disciplinary folds of literature, ethnography, religion, ethics, and such new-world topics as islands, cannibals, Brazil and the invention of the savage, cartography, navigation, and instrumentation, to name only a few. The present volume presents new research conducted since he published his trilogy on cosmography during the early 1990s (Le Huguenot et le sauvage: L'Amérique et la controverse coloniale en France au temps des guerres de Religion (1990), L'Atelier du cosmographe, ou l'image du monde à la Renaissance (1991), and André Thevet, cosmographe des derniers Valois (1991). The richness of these works may be captured by the notion that ocular testi-mony — generally speaking, the senses — established experience in the latter sixteenth century as a bona fide category of knowledge, thus calling into question earlier paradigms founded on bookish knowledge, including the allegorizing of the natural world. Sous la leçon des vents is essential reading for all Renaissance specialists. Specifically, it demonstrates how cosmology and textuality colluded after 1550 to create an amalgam of old and new ways of perceiving. Montaigne's Essays are the sublime record of how varietas challenged orthodoxy, but as Lestringant shows, the poets Joachim Du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, and Du Bartas, the Guise family, the explorer Jean de Léry, Bernard Palissy, and others found a source for the Imaginary in Thévet's encyclopedic range of particulars, or so-called anomalies, in distant lands. As Lestringant shows, Thévet was a strong voice in the ongoing battle to liberate the study of nature from universal laws, with consequences for how writers understood representation, as we shall see below.

The book's seventeen chapters are divided into four parts: "Le cosmographe en son siècle," "L'Orient captif," "Le Monde ouvert," and "Leçons de plein vent." An epilogue on the cosmographer's melancholy follows, and the book concludes with Thevetiana, on the author's critical reception (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries). In part 1, the chapters include "Fondations mythiques" on François I^er, followed by other chapters on Michel de l'Hospital, Thévet and the Guise family, and Thévet's religion which begins: "Satan voyage. Satan ignore les frontiers" (97), arguing that sea voyages provided no escape from the ills of terra firma. In part 2, the chapters situate Thévet's cosmography with reference to classical humanism, including archeological fictions, Du Bellay's L'Olive, the tragedies of Robert Garnier, and oriental stories using Thévet's Les Vrais Portraits et Vies des Hommes illustres (1584) à la Plutarch as a focal point. Part 3 examines Thévet's Singularitez de la France Antarctique (1557) as a narrative montage of the old and new learning in a mixed genre of stories, encyclopedias, pro and contra argumentation, and Thévet's use of problemata, the late-classical dialogues...