Cosmographical Novelties in French Renaissance Prose (1550–1630): Dialectic and Discovery by Raphaële Garrod (review)

This impressive and original book assesses early modern epistemological shifts by paying close attention to the argumentative and rhetorical strategies of five vernacular prose texts, some canonical (Montaigne’s ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’ and Descartes’s Le Monde) and others non-canonical (François Belleforest’s Cosmographie universelle de tout le monde; Pierre de La Primaudaye’s Troisième tome de l’Académie françoise; and Étienne Binet’s ‘Pour parler des cieux et de ses merveilles’ in the Essay des merveilles de nature et des plus nobles artifices, a Jesuit manual of sermon oratory). Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia universalis is also studied in detail alongside Belleforest’s Cosmographie, which was based upon it. Raphaële Garrod analyses what these works say — and do not say — through the lens of early modern dialectic, specifically its shifting notion of the ‘probable’ and its loci (structures or forms of argument). Her point is not that the authors in question made conscious use of dialectic but rather that it informed their writing practice and hence the discursive ‘invention’ (both discovery and construction) of cosmological and cosmographical ‘novelties’. Because Garrod is interested in how natural philosophy and cosmography are shaped to serve writers’ varied purposes, not all of the texts studied are primarily about these subjects. Garrod sets her selected corpus against textbooks epitomizing the scholastic orthodoxy in astronomy and natural philosophy. An Introduction provides an overview of dialectic and its relationship to natural philosophy, and appendices draw together the presentations in different dialectic textbooks of the loci that feature most heavily in Garrod’s analysis. The discussion bristles with rich insights into the construction of early modern knowledge in areas ranging from natural theology to astronomy to geography; into miscellaneous or copious genres; and into Garrod’s chosen texts. The central thesis is that dialectic enables us to make sense of the complex and heterogeneous history of the invention of cosmographical novelties, which saw a variety of diverse world views current simultaneously over the longue durée. ‘Novelties’ were exegetical alternatives that disturbed the natural-philosophical doxa, and thus included classical texts other than those favoured by scholasticism, as well as observational and experiential sources. In the traditional historiography of the so-called Scientific Revolution, novelties are usually aligned with ‘experience’, which is understood in opposition to the bookish. They are considered to have brought about the rejection in natural philosophy of both dialectic understood as logic and also uses of dialectic stemming from the textual learning of humanism. However, Garrod argues, the scholastic orthodoxy was troubled less by discoveries in themselves than by their discursive invention as novelties, which was dependent on the tools of dialectic. In the case of some of the early modern arguments under study, one might wonder about the extent to which dialectic constitutes not only a useful framework for us to analyse them but also an increasingly ‘flexible toolkit’ (passim) with which they were shaped: for example, while dialectic’s rhetorical turn brought new kinds of arguments under its umbrella, did this turn actually facilitate those arguments? Whatever the answer, this book makes a distinctive and compelling contribution to ongoing historiographical revisions of the ‘Scientific Revolution’, and to methodological innovation at the intersection of literary studies and the history of science.