Béroalde’s Besson: A Machinery of Creative Investigation

• In Event: Vision and Its Instruments in Early Modern Literature III

Abstract

Among the earliest writings attributed to polymath Béroalde de Verville (1556-1625) are his explications of the instruments comprising Jacques Besson’s Theatre d’instruments mathematiques & mechaniques (Lyon, 1578). Via Besson (a “twin”) he anticipates his stéganographie, a creative process based on alchemical transformation. At once fanciful and practical, the instruments belong to a machinery of exploration that informs Béroalde’s poetry (Les Apprehensions spirituelles and Les soupirs amoureux), his novels (Le Voyage des princes fortunes), a book of oddities (Le Palais des curieux) and his edition of the Hypernotomachia poliphilii (titled Le Tableau des riches inventions couvertes du voile des feintes amoureuses…). The wager of this paper is that, along with Besson’s Art & moyen de tirer huyles et eaux… (1573), the Theatre figures in a common praxis alchymiae in which optical theory and practice meld science and imagination.

Author

• Tom Conley, Harvard University