La nature et les prodiges: L'insolite au XVIe siecle.

Jean Ceard. (Coll. Titre courant 2.) Geneva: Droz, 1996. xiv + 538 pp. FF 120. ISBN: 2-600-00502-1.

Many of the copious studies on sixteenth-century France published over the last two years reconsider science in light of the fine arts and literature. Why and how the world was observed with assertive curiosity and sudden intensity are questions studied in the selection above, chosen from a gamut of monographs that either work on canonical authors or reedit an array of strange texts that are neither fish nor fowl. As a result the horizon of French studies in the Renaissance has considerably broadened. In 1980 Numa Broc noted that when Petrarch ascended Mount Ventoux he was "probably the first European to express a personal emotion in front of a landscape, loving the forest and the mountain that the Middle Ages had feared."(1) With Petrarch the natural world becomes a ground for the cultivation of experience, affect, and language. It inspires fear but also new concerns about the fragility of things, as well as an epistemic drive to name, order, represent, and categorize them. An inventory of French work in 1996 and 1997 reveals collective attention drawn to the apprehension of a physical world, thought to be given by a supreme creator, that is also perceived as born of a productive chaos. Recent studies show that, for writers and natural scientists alike, doubt becomes a creative faculty mobilizing investigation of a suddenly expanding world composed of a dizzying variety of flora and fauna.

In this respect the most important general contribution, for which an English translation is announced, is Michel Jeanneret's Perpetuum mobile. The book is written to synthesize overlapping practices in the sciences and the arts and to introduce a general reader to the chaotic and ever-unfinished process of creation. For Jeanneret works of the Renaissance signal an aptitude to become other, greater, and of greater metamorphic potential than what they appear to be. "The quality of an object is equated with its energetic reserve and the vigor of its elan," he writes (6). Artistic creation acknowledges the pleasure of building open-ended forms from swirls of energies, provisionally managed, that always exceed their containing forms. Works and lives from 1480 to 1600 undergo sea-changes in a constant play of force and matter. Jeanneret's magnificent analyses turn about da Vinci's notes and drawings of the effects of wind and water, elements that visibly release monstrous forces, and that at once fascinate and inspire fear. The observations in the Notebooks are tested by studies of extremes of stability and errancy that plot the lives of Petrarch, Erasmus, Louis le Roy, Piero di Cosimo, Ambroise Pare, Conrad Gesner, and others. Jeanneret shows how the birth pangs of vernacular languages convey the same mobilities, and how the works fashioned in the melting pot of classical and vernacular idioms can be likened to cinematic montages. The form of Perpetuum mobile resembles a filmic style in its alternating views of texts of different genres (epic poetry, sonnets, personal essays, historiography, dictionaries) and readings of visual expression (scientific sketchbooks, anatomical drawings, mappaemundi, garden designs, artificial grottoes, sculpture, emblems illustrating editions of the Metamorphoses) to extend the criteria that push the "Baroque" back through Mannerism and past the advent of Cartesian rectitude. Today there exists no finer or clearer overview of the creative drives of the Renaissance.

Jeanneret considers scientific observation and literary expression coextensively. The reedition of Jean Ceard's classic La nature et les prodiges: L'insolite au XVIe siecle sustains that view. With the photographic reproduction of the work of 1977 (including the bibliography excised from the original) readers can now consult a crucial study of the relation of man and nature in early modern Europe. Ceard reaffirms that epistemology precedes ontology in a world informed by a heritage of belief. A jewelled conclusion sums up the chapters on monsters that are aberrations of nature. They are of a greater magnitude than prodigies, understood to be excesses of the physical world. They take shape as marvels, miracles, and divinatory evidence in popular and learned texts printed in the age of Humanism; in the birth of signs that emerge from nature and their relation to God's providence; in the new literature of prodigies and of geographical singularities witnessed in the writings of Pierre Boaistuau and Andre Thevet; in the medical treatises of Ambroise Pare, a surgeon who finds miraculous events in human anatomy; but also in Louis Le Roy on the viscissitudes of history; in Montaigne and the skeptical crisis of knowledge he witnesses in his own life. Divination in fact encapsulates knowledge, which is based on recognizing, gathering, and ordering signs. Signs are "at once the basis of knowledge and the indication that knowledge cannot reach the deeper being of things; placed between things and knowledge, the sign pushes knowledge in the direction of things, but at the same time it marks how much things relay only images or reflections of things" (487). The writer and scientist seek knowledge through the variety of objects they perceive. They look for "dynamic unities" in the marks of nature, concomitantly located in the seeker, that require simultaneously inward and outward views. Knowledge perpetually reconstitutes networks of resemblances and differences that reveal the contours of things. If singularity is the property whereby every single thing is "neither entirely ever the same nor entirely other, then nature is dynamic in the way its parts correspond with each other" (487). The "machine" that constitutes the world is an "intimate conspiration" of its parts animated by its own powerful life. Nature is endowed with will and force seen by way of marvels that "raise a corner of the veil in which the mystery of things is enveloped" (491). With Montaigne, however, the science of man is no longer patterned according to the science of God. Detached from a sacred origin, human reason is utterly feeble, relative, set afloat in a universe without an ostensively divine pattern. In his new preface Ceard remarks that for the Renaissance admiration and miracle connote astonishment, surprise, and mixed feelings of fear and marvel. Ambivalence inspired by the signs of nature at work defines the heuristic virtue of the monster in the eyes of its observers. Its uncommon occurrence begs its witnesses not to ask why (pour quoi) it takes place, but for what reason (pour quoi) (7).

Philippe Glardon, Frank Lestringant, and Anne-Marie Beaulieu, editors, respectively, of Pierre Belon du Mans's Histoire de la nature des oyseaux (1555), Bernard Palissy's Recette veritable (1563) and Lancelot Voisin de la Popeliniere's Les trois mondes (1582) offer texts that prove Ceard's hypotheses. Belon ranks among the great natural scientists and travelers who looked at the "singularities" of nature of his time through the filter of Pliny and the classical past. His survey of the birds inhabiting the kingdom of Henry II, in a handsome edition printed by Gilles Corrozet, remains a great monument in the history of ornithology and observation. His descriptions of common and migratory birds are constructed both as illustrations (in the style anticipating Audubon and Roger Tory Peterson) and as emblem-enigmas that mix Greek citations, Latin nomenclature, and detailed woodcuts of volatiles perched on plinths or classical edicules. The reader senses how ornithology becomes a science of expanding space. When birds are tracked along their migratory routes their habitus becomes less a sign of divine presence than a pattern in a greater ecology of seasonal time and space. Glardon's introduction offers avenues of future research on geography and space in the terms that animals defined for humans. Ironically, Belon, a writer who extended observation into the mysteries of everyday life, was mugged and murdered while observing plants in the Bois de Boulogne in 1564.

Bernard Palissy, a Protestant savant who specialized in designing architectural plans, building grottoes, writing agricultural tracts, and launching manifestoes for his religious cause, died incarcerated in 1589. Lestringant's ample preface notes how Palissy unveils "some of the secrets of nature and agriculture" by cultivating the earth "without exhausting it, pruning trees without molesting them" (16). Palissy staged a dialogue to show how nature's treasures can be multiplied and augmented through tact, care, and alert observation. In his gardens he frames utopian spaces based on the model of lost paradises now scaled in miniature. The spaces that they plot are dreams put into practice. Many of the buildings and gardens are drawn from Francesco Colonna's Songe de Poliphile (the first French translation of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili appearing in 1546, on which Palissy based his Recette). Palissy's buildings nestle into nature that is "a reality composed of rocks and running water, trees and fruits in which are immediately written the living word" (38). He builds a cockleshell city whose spiral, reminiscent of Vitruvius and Alberti, twists and folds surfaces inside and out. Relations of the container and the contained are inverted in a "topographical expression of a mannerist desire, the symbol of a bonded social body, like the garden, perfectly legible in its protected transparence" (42). The edition is richly illustrated with comparative plans from Serlio, Philibert de l'Orme, Hugues Sambin, and popular images in emblem books and contemporary religious broadsheets. The work and its edition will tie future scholarship in literature to the applied arts and their development during the Wars of Religion.

Lancelot Voisin's Les trois mondes (Paris, 1582), a product of a Protestant soldier who turned into a historiographer in a tortuous life dedicated to religion, argues for the existence of an austral continent providentially reserved for colonization on the part of victims of Catholic violence. Following his Histoire de France by one year, the book schematizes the world as it would later be understood in his posthumous French edition of Mercator's Atlas minor (1608). The work develops from intuitions about Australia from its personification as Magellanica on the title-page of Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570), a peninsula ("Regio Patalis") jutting north from Antarctica named as "Terra Australis" on the right panel of Oronce Fine's double cordiform world-map of 1531 (tipped into Gryneaus's Novus orbis), and accounts from both Antonio Pigafetta and earlier Portuguese explorers known to have passed by the land that James Cook officially discovered in his voyage of 1772-1775. Les trois mondes is the work of a "studio geographer" who mixes classical and modern science in a textual hodge-podge that Beaulieu deciphers with care and expertise. She demonstrates that the beauty of the tract derives from a camouflage of sources overlaid, mistranslated, and often conferred with false attributions. The menippean creation that results signals a vital disproportion in respect to its colonial aims, its classical sources, its self-fashioning, and its own affiliation with an ideology of neutral historiography. Beaulieu's new edition will buttress and advance studies in North America by Orest Ranum and Zachary Schiffman.

In Signes dissimilaires Jan Miernowski asks how poets display the unknown in a language that forcibly cannot assign a name to it. In the context of this exciting monograph the scientist or geographer - a Belon, a Palissy, or a Popeliniere - who inquires of the signs in a world bathed in the shadows of a divine creator becomes the counterpart to the mystical writer. The poet discovers an astonishing dissimilarity in the abyss and complementarity of a divine world that is all (Tout) in view of its abject inhabitants (who are rien). The religious aura of these imbalances or "dissimilar signs" (a debt to Ceard's model is clear) pulls the poet into a world that might be likened to what Christopher Bollas calls the "unthought known," a feeling of aesthetic and spiritual substance that, although beyond the language of whoever perceives or thinks of that relation, is fathomable to sensation and being.(2) Dissimilar signs are glimpsed in areas between the body, the environment, and an overriding sense of the inadequacy of language to name the physical and psychic apparatus of the world. Miernowski revives Denis the Areopagite's Christian Neo-platonism and Charles de Bovelles's De nihilo (1510) to build a case for the mystical style in Marguerite de Navarre's poetry and tales, Clement Marot's self-effacing poetry of circumstance, Ronsard's nomination of an "immanent sacred or a sort of sacred secular" (151) in the Hymnes, and Lefevre de la Boderie's poetics of rational illumination. In these writers the observer of nature sees worlds of things bereft of language; the poet respects physical matter by pondering its effects before they happen to be named and taxonomized.

In Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophete Gerard Defaux resumes much of his earlier writings on Rabelais. In a hefty monograph (counting 626 pages) he asserts that for Rabelais, ideal writing constitutes, as it had been in the Old Testament, "a weapon and pure violence, at once sword, whip and rod, an instrument of malediction and fulmination, of punishment and vengeance; but also dazzle and jubilation, freedom, power and play, a bliss of the self in and through the Word" (572). With histrionic passion the author seeks to "become-Rabelais" and in doing so stages the persona of a "Defaux-agonistes" battling throngs of infidels and illiterates deaf to the wisdom of Saint Paul and the evangelical sources dear to Rabelais. Fresh material inflected by science and nature is taken up on the chapters on the Quart Livre, where Defaux argues contra Lestringant's and Jeanneret's hypotheses that the book is a proto-ethnographic island book or is infused with doubt about creation.(3) Defaux marshals what he calls a "cosmographic" reading ["in altitude, with totalizing pretensions and aims" (494)] to show that the book is a mordant satire of Papal Rome, built according to a centering perspective that places the thirty-fourth chapter around equal units of thirty-three chapters on either side. At the vanishing center is Pantagruel's combat with the monstrous whale, a physetere. The "perfect numerical center and epiphanic moment of the book" (497), the episode becomes an allegory in which the new evangelist, "an apostle of true religion and the prophet of the primitive church," is pitted against "the monster, the unearthly beast, at once grotesque and formidable, that symbolically stands in his way" (513). The papal monster would be the scaly cetacean that Pantagruel studs with arrows. The chapter anticipates the allegory of Moby-Dick. The scientific dimension of the combat is seen in its relation to the image of whales in Olaus Magnus's map and register of fauna of the northern seas. The episode is a piece of cartographical writing.(4) The reminder of a mapped world might have reached back in Rabelais's edition of Bartolomeo Marliani's Topographia antiquae Romae (Lyons, 1534) destined for Jean Du Bellay, but in 1551 the monstrous site of Rome that Defaux marks off becomes a behemoth that in fact shares much with its murderer. Both whale and hero are monsters. "Pantagruel," the text quietly notes, "considerant l'occasion et necessite, desploya ses bras et monstre ce qu'il scavoit faire...."(5)As physetere suggests, the whale embodies nature but inspires admiration about what is unknown on the ocean of an expanded oecumene. It is what inspires its enemy to destroy what seems excessive in the physical world. What Defaux stabilizes in a Christian allegory in fact betrays a greater ambivalence about the dubious consequences of anthropocentrism.

Philip Hendricks close analysis of Montaigne's translation (1569) of Raimond Sebond's Theologia naturalis sire liber creaturarum (1485) studies the gap opened between the state of natural science in the fifteenthcentury author's hieratic universe and its anachronistic look in the wake of new discoveries eighty-four years later. The translation mediates the differences by turning a turgid Latin into an exercise of style in which Montaigne's vernacular becomes both creative volition and a mobile site where alterity and transformation are welcomed. Where Sebond insisted on man's imperative to act on behalf of all creatures (to contain their differences in a hierarchical scheme that man imposes in the name of God), Montaigne insists on showing the ties that link them in a loose webbing of matter, signs, and language. Montaigne horizontalizes Sebond's verticality, blurring the distinction between human and animal in an art of translation that betrays an ecological empathy. That a "style" of writing is crucial to the metaphysics shows how a new path is opened for description of the world.

From all of these works an uneasiness is evinced about what happens when the sixteenth-century author discerns the breadth and variety of nature. These studies look to the physical world as if what constituted its natural wealth in the sixteenth century were now a lost or partial object, indeed a reflection of greater creation, that has become almost invisible or eradicated. All of the studies mark a desire to reconstitute from the chaos of early modern science the thrill of motion and constancy of change. Most engage their topics with a politics of tact that revise our ideas about violence done to the world in what Walter Mignolo recently called "the darker side of the Renaissance."(6) A sense of the dynamic beauty of nature is cast in idioms that mix classical observation with tenets of Pauline evangelism or creative doubt. Through these works the effects of an environmental consciousness and an affective sense of habitus are regained. They incite us both to look at what Rabelais, Belon, Palissy, Montaigne, and others observed with wonder and to evaluate the resemblances and differences that emerge from the comparison of our world to their world.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

1 Numa Broc, La geographie de la Renaissance (1480-1620) (Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1980): 211.

2 "It is rather like an eidetic experience, accompanied by an intense feeling and a sense of wonder or discovery. It may not be dear to the person what he [or she] has discovered but the picturing inside the mind of some person or event has the integrity of memory rather than the fracture of hallucination," notes Bollas about the condition in The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987): 271.

3 Frank Lestringant, "L'insulaire de Rabelais ou la fiction en archipel," reprinted in Ecrire le monde a la Renaissance. Quinze etudes sur Rabelais, Postel, Bodin et la litterature geographique (Caen: Editions Paradigrne, 1993): 159-84; Michel Jeanneret, Le defi des signes. Rabelais et la crise de l'enterpretation a la Renaissance (Orleans: Editions Paradigme, 1996).

4 Samuel Kinset analyzes the episode with care and brio in his Rabelais's Carnaval (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

5 Rabelais, Le Quart livre, in Mireille Huchon, ed., Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard/Pleiade, 1994): 618 (my emphasis).

6 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization (Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press, 1995).