René Descartes: Tutte le lettere, 1619-1650 (review)

The publication of a new scholarly edition of important primary sources is an event to be celebrated. This new edition of Descartes's correspondence—the fruit of decades of close textual study by Giulia Belgioioso and her team at the University of Lecce—should be greeted with congratulations all around. This Cartesian cube (the book contains almost 3200 pages) adds letters to the list of Descartes's published correspondence and includes formidable scholarly apparatus. Belgioioso and her team at the University of Lecce have made an enormous contribution to scholarship on Descartes and on early modern philosophy more generally.

Belgioioso has published 732 of Descartes's letters that were originally written in Latin, French, and Dutch. It eliminates the editorial confusion found in the new edition of Charles Adam and Paul Tannery's Oeuvres de Descartes (1974), which contained 586 letters, plus additional ones in the appendices and supplements. Belgioioso and her colleagues (Igor Agostini, Francesco Marrone, Franco A. Meschini, Massimiliano Savini, and Jean-Robert Armogathe) have, thus, significantly rationalized access to the letters in print.

Each letter appears in its original language, accompanied by a facing-page Italian translation. Extensive footnotes identify individuals and events mentioned in the letters, as well as giving information about the publication history and provenance of each letter. In addition to the details provided in these footnotes, the book's introduction describes every published edition of Descartes's letters, starting with Claude Clerselier's collection, published in three volumes between 1657 and 1667, and ending with the two editions of Adam and Tannery. The introduction also describes some of the important topics addressed in the letters—such as mathematics and philosophy—as well as the broader intellectual and international contexts within which Descartes worked.

Almost 300 pages of scholarly apparatus follow the original texts and the translations of the letters. In tables edited by Siegrid Agostini, there are concordances between this edition of the letters and the earlier published collections, as well as a concordance with the letters between Descartes and Regius. There are also a list of new attributions and an alphabetical listing of the correspondence (edited by Agnese Alemanno). The last section of the book includes a biographical profile of Descartes, a very useful biographical index of his correspondents, a bibliography of both primary and secondary sources, and a lexicon of key terms used in the letters. These tables and indices are the result of enormous labor and enhance the usefulness of this volume.

Although most of these letters have been published in earlier collections, the present volume gathers them all in one place and puts them in a coherent order, thereby overcoming the confusion generated by the appendices and supplements added to successive editions of Adam and Tannery's Oeuvres de Descartes. Basing their editorial decisions on close study of the manuscripts, Belgioioso's team has put the letters in chronological order and provided new dates for a number of letters. Not only will students of Descartes find the material more coherent, but they will also be better able to trace the development of his ideas and his relationships with his contemporaries. The letters provide an image of the private Descartes, his intellectual concerns, and the network of savants with whom he communicated. At a time when historians of philosophy are taking a more contextualized approach to their subject, a new, more accessible edition of Descartes's letters is a welcome addition to the available scholarly resources.

This beautifully produced and reasonably priced new edition of Descartes's letters is an essential resource for the study of Descartes and early modern philosophy. It is a major scholarly achievement that should find a place on the bookshelves of scholars, as well as in research libraries, around the world.