Fiction and the Frontiers of Knowledge in Europe, 1500–1800 ed. by Richard Scholar and Alexis Tadié (review)

This collection, stemming from a pair of workshops held in Oxford in 2007, is a useful compendium of recent approaches to the question of literary, legal, and philosophical ‘fictions’. It bears a family resemblance to Neil Kenny’s edited volume Philosophical Fictions and the French Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1991), mentioned by the editors (p. 5). The elegant Introduction, by Richard Scholar and Alexis Tadié, presents the stakes of ‘fiction’ conceived, in Johnson’s definition, as ‘the act of feigning or inventing’ or ‘the thing feigned or invented’ (p. 1). An excellent starting point for the reader (which would have worked well at the beginning of the volume) is Isabelle Moreau’s overview of the uses of French seventeenth-century ‘fiction’ in its judicial, theatrical, and (natural-)philosophical senses. Wes Williams’s polished examination of conditional statements in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French writing is a model of patient close analysis. Anne Simonin’s article on the ‘terror as a legal fiction’, focusing on manoeuvres of self-justification by French revolutionary authorities (who proceed as if France were under siege), is an important contribution to the volume. Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles and ‘Molyneux’s problem’, a philosophical conundrum (Molyneux asks if a person born blind, acquainted with the shapes of spheres and cubes by touch, would recognize them if sight were restored), is the focus of Kate Tunstall’s lucid take on the ethics of eighteenth-century philosophical and medical research. Luc Foisneau’s article on fiction in Hobbes’s philosophical system — the term ‘system’ is Foisneau’s — is a clear account of the question of philosophical fictions, engaging in particular with rhetorical considerations. (I am less convinced by Foisneau’s appeal to Kuhnian ‘paradigm shifts’.) The book is carefully edited: it is, admirably, almost completely free from minor errors. Yet volumes of this sort are nearly always heterogeneous — in this case there are both general overviews and specifically focused pieces — and thus I am not certain that the chronological dispositio of the volume works best. Isabelle Pantin’s excellent article about Girolamo Fracastoro’s Syphilis (1530) explains the use of poetry as a speculative tool for examining the aetiology of the ‘French disease’, yet in its focus it is perhaps not the best choice to open the volume. Moreover, ‘Europe’ is perhaps too broad a geographical spread for a collection largely concerned with Britain, France, and, in one case, Italy, with only occasional excursuses into, for example, German sources. I was startled to read a sentence in Robert Mankin’s otherwise stimulating article, on personal identity in Locke and printed authorial portraits, that implies that Montaigne was a contemporary of John Locke: ‘More than any of these examples from living authors except perhaps Montaigne, Locke’s aim was . . .’ (p. 100). This is certainly a slip of the pen — what is meant, I think, is that Montaigne’s written self-portrait was also a portrait from life — but one that might nonetheless have been caught before the volume went to press. Such minor problems do not detract from the very considerable usefulness of this collection.