Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life 1650–1720 (review)

The long and versatile career of Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721) well illustrates the gradual transformation of the Renaissance res publica litterarum, in which Latin was still the main vehicle of learning, into an intellectual community more open to the vernacular literatures and to the sciences, a prelude to the age of the Enlightenment.

Huet’s early training was traditional and religious, at the Jesuit collège near Caen, his birthplace. After the usual study of Latin and Greek he began to learn Hebrew with a Huguenot scholar, Samuel Bochart, much to the chagrin of his Jesuit mentors, and even accompanied him on a trip to Queen Christina’s court in Sweden, where he discovered a commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St. Matthew. With Bochart he traveled also to the Netherlands, to the University of Leiden, where philology reigned as queen of the sciences, and met many famous scholars there.

Returned to Caen, Huet became associated with a group of poets, members of a learned society known as the Academia Briosa, who met at the home of Jacques Moisant de Brieux. Through one of these poets he was introduced into the Parisian salon of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, where he made the acquaintance of important female literary figures of the period, Mlle. de Scudéry, Madame de La Fayette, and the talented poet and critic, René Rapin, among others. Huet began to write Latin verse himself during the decade from 1653 to 1663 together with other members of various literary academies. Shelford provides a diagram illustrating relations among them by the use of gray and black ovals representing those poets whose criticism Huet sought and the gatherings where Latin poetry was read and critiqued. There are several such diagrams dispersed throughout the book, which I find to be somewhat distracting and graphically unattractive. The content of some of the more notable of these poems is discussed but there is little attempt made to evaluate them as poetry and, unfortunately, the original Latin texts are never given.

In a note of thanks to Huet for the gift of his novel, Diane de Castro, the Marquise de Lambert used a phrase in which she distinguishes the land of reasoning and learning (men’s domain) from the empire of the imagination, which is women’s portion. Here again it would have been useful to have the original French wording. From this simple figure of speech Shelford creates what she terms an umbrella concept, “The Empire of Women,” to be set against the Republic of Letters. In my perception this construction of two “socio-intellectual spaces,” the homosocial, learned academies versus the mixed-sex, female-dominated salon is rather forced. A long, complicated chart is provided to trace Huet’s interactions in the Empire of Women to support this view. In the case of Huet, at least, there do not seem to have been any separating barriers. He obviously enjoyed the company of learned, sophisticated women, and corresponded and collaborated with them. He engaged the young Anne Dacier to edit several Latin authors for the famous series of classical authors for the Dauphin of France, Ad usum Delphini, of which he was the editor. He encouraged the Abbess de Rohan to publish La morale du sage and she in turn would assist him a few years later in writing his treatise on the origin of the novel.

The next phase of Huet’s career is concerned with natural philosophy and science. Together with a compatriot of Caen, André Graindorge, he founded a scientific academy in his native city, and participated in anatomical and physical experiments. In 1679 he wrote an important apologetic work, the Demonstratio evangelica, which took rise from debates he had with Menasseh Ben Israel at the Jewish temple in Amsterdam in the 1650s. It is a complex and highly...