Sous la lecon des vents: Le monde d'Andre Thevet, cosmographe de la Renaissance.(Book Review)

Frank Lestringant. Sous la lecon des vents: Le monde d'Andre Thevet, cosmographe de la Renaissance.

Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003. 472 pp. [euro]32. ISBN: 2-84050-292-5.

Frank Lestringant's most recent work, Sous la lecon des vents: Le monde d'Andre Thevet, cosmographe de la Renaissance, groups together essays on Andre Thevet (1516-92), cosmographer of the last Valois kings and author of books on cosmography and the new world, beginning with the Cosmographie de Levant (1554) and Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (1557, 1558), and culminating with La Cosmographie universelle (1575) and Le Grand Insulaire et Pilotage (ca. 1586-87). Still relatively unknown to Renaissance literary scholars, Thevet was in his time immensely fascinating to such leading lights as Gessner, Belon, Belleforest, Pare, Lery, and Aldrovandi, as well as to humanists and poets whose expanding universe obliged them to validate experience as against the received dogmas of Aristotle and of medieval Scholastic philosophers …