1. Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist’s Role in Society: A Comparative Study (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1971); Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), the first two volumes in a four-volume venture; H. Floris Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010).

2. Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). See also Patrick O’Brien, “Historical Foundations for a Global Perspective on the Emergence of a Western European Regime for the Discovery, Development, and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge,” Journal of Global History 8, no. 1 (2013): 1–24.

3. For recent attempts to rethink these developments in a global context, see, for example, Simon Schaffer, “Newton on the Beach: The Information Order of Principia Mathematica,” History of Science 47, no. 3 (2009): 243–76; Kapil Raj, “Thinking without the Scientific Revolution: Global Interactions and the Construction of Knowledge,” in “After the Scientific Revolution,” ed. J. B. Shank, special issue, Journal of Early Modern History 21, no. 5 (2017): 445–58, as well as the other articles in the same issue; James Delbourgo, “The Knowing World: A New Global History of Science,” History of Science 57, no. 3 (2019): 373–99; and the recent attempt at synthesis in James Poskett, Horizons: A Global History of Science (London: Penguin, 2022).

4. For Fontenelle, “the art of thinking and the art of writing were inseparable,” and his theoretical reflections developed ideas first expressed in his earlier poetical works: Sophie Audidière, “Fontenelle ou la tendresse philosophe,” introduction to Bernard de Fontenelle, Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes et autres textes philosophiques, ed. Sophie Audidière et al. (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), 13–58, here pp. 17 and 20; Stephen Gaukroger, “The Académie des Sciences and the Republic of Letters: Fontenelle’s Role in the Shaping of a New Natural-Philosophical Persona, 1699–1734,” Intellectual History Review 18, no. 3 (2008): 385–402; Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism, chap. 6; J. B. Shank, Before Voltaire: The French Origins of “Newtonian” Mechanics, 1680–1715 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Maria Susana Seguin, “Anciens et Modernes à l’Académie des sciences,” in Anciens et Modernes face aux pouvoirs. L’Église, le roi, les académies, 1687–1750, ed. Christelle Bahier-Porte and Delphine Reguig (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2022), 179–98; Simone Mazauric, Fontenelle et l’invention de l’histoire des sciences à l’aube des Lumières (Paris: Fayard, 2007).

5. Female authors had a different social profile from their male counterparts—they did not, for instance, seek out the same relations of patronage—and their connection to the questions addressed in this article merits further study.

6. See Peter Burke, “Two Crises of Historical Consciousness,” Storia della Storiografia 33 (1998): 3–16, especially p. 7; more generally, see François Furet, “La naissance de l’histoire,” in L’atelier de l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), 101–27.

7. For a general analysis of the place of France in the Enlightenment, see Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 104–106; for a revisionist view, see Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Le mythe de l’Europe française au xviii^e siècle. Diplomatie, culture et sociabilités au temps des Lumières (Paris: Autrement, 2007).

8. Stéphane Van Damme, Paris, capitale philosophique. De la Fronde à la Révolution (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005).

9. David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (London: Penguin, 2015), 6–12; see also Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds., The Scientific Revolution in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

10. M. de V. [Voltaire], Lettres philosophiques (Amsterdam: Chez E. Lucas, au Livre d’or, 1734), 139–40.

11. Mokyr, Culture of Growth, especially 59–69, and 99–115 on Newton.

12. See, for example, Simon Schaffer, “Newtonianism,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R. C. Olby et al. (London: Routledge, 1990), 610–26; Margaret C. Jacob, “The Truth of Newton’s Science and the Truth of Science’s History: Heroic Science at Its Eighteenth-Century Formulation,” in Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 315–32; and the works of J. B. Shank. Compare Mokyr’s stress on the importance of “content bias” (the success of Newton’s ideas) in the making of Newtonianism, despite his acknowledgment of the role of mediators. For example, “The trend toward mechanistic thinking was the product of the thought and labor of many people … who used Newton’s findings in ways that he himself would not have approved of”: Mokyr, Culture of Growth, 104.

13. As evidenced, for example, in the debate around Toby E. Huff, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Ting Xu and Khodadad Rezakhani, “Reorienting the Discovery Machine: Perspectives from China and Islamdom on Toby Huff’s Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective,” Journal of World History 23, no. 2 (2012): 401–12. I develop this perspective further in Oded Rabinovitch, “The ‘System of the World’ and the Scientific Culture of Early Modern France,” Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 78, no. 1 (2024): 29–51.

14. Christian Jouhaud, Les pouvoirs de la littérature. Histoire d’un paradoxe (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); and, in the context of philosophy, Dinah Ribard, Raconter, vivre, penser. Histoire(s) de philosophes, 1650–1766 (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS/J. Vrin, 2003).

15. Alain Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain. Sociologie de la littérature à l’âge classique (Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1985), especially 29–50 and 270–90; compare Robert A. Schneider, Dignified Retreat: Writers and Intellectuals in the Age of Richelieu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

16. See the overviews in Emily Butterworth, “Women Writers in the Sixteenth Century,” and Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, “Seventeenth-Century Women Writers,” both in The Cambridge History of French Literature, ed. William Burgwinkle, Nicholas Hammond, and Emma Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 211–19 and 306–15, respectively.

17. For examples, see Caroline Sherman, “The Genealogy of Knowledge: The Godefroy Family, Erudition, and Legal-Historical Service to the State” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008), 177–95; Oded Rabinovitch, The Perraults: A Family of Letters in Early Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 44. Such cases seem to go beyond the educational role of women in the medieval aristocracy, described in Michael Clanchy, “Did Mothers Teach Their Children to Read?” in Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe, 400–1400: Essays Presented to Henrietta Leyser, ed. Conrad Leyser and Lesley Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 129–53.

18. April Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 77–113; Schneider, Dignified Retreat, 107–21.

19. Nicolas Boileau, “Satire X,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Françoise Escal (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 62–80; Charles Perrault, L’apologie des femmes (Paris: Veuve J.-B. Coignard et J.-B. Coignard fils, 1694).

20. Letter from René Descartes to Desargues, June 19, 1639, in Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 12 vols. (1964–1974; Paris: J. Vrin, 1996), 2:553–57, here pp. 554–55.

21. Ibid.

22. Antoine Baudeau de Somaize, Le dictionnaire des précieuses […], [1660], ed. C. L. Livet, 2 vols. (Paris: P. Jannet, 1856); cited in Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 103–41.

23. Baudeau de Somaize, Le dictionnaire des précieuses, 1:59. See also Sutton, Science for a Polite Society, 104–106. For Sutton, these fourteen cases (out of about 300) represent a relatively weak interest in natural philosophy among “polite society,” which would quickly change in the following decades. I would argue that this is already a considerable presence, considering the fact that Somaize was mostly interested in other details in the lives of his subjects.

24. For example, Mercure galant (July 1682), 361–62 (publication on the conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars); Mercure galant (June 1681), 260–62 (wondrous stories on two pregnant women). See further Christophe Schuwey, Un entrepreneur des lettres au xvii^e siècle. Donneau de Visé, de Molière au “Mercure galant” (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020). On the broader phenomenon of the rise of scholarly and political journals in the period, see Jean-Pierre Vittu, “Du Journal des savants aux Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts : l’esquisse d’un système européen des périodiques savants,” xvii^e siècle 228 (2005): 527–45; Marion Brétéché and Dinah Ribard, “Qu’est-ce que les mercures au temps du Mercure galant ?” in “Auctorialité, voix et public dans le Mercure galant,” special issue, xvii^e siècle 270 (2016): 9–22.

25. Jacques Rohault, Entretiens sur la philosophie (Paris: Michel Le Petit, 1671), structured as a conversation between the author and an amateur obliged to take up military service to maintain the status of his house, touches on topics such as the physics of the Eucharist and the soul of animals. Rohault, Traité de physique (Paris: Veuve de Charles Savreux, 1671), deals with topics such as light and vision (1:264–378) or weight and the tides (2:118–40).

26. In Les femmes savantes (1672), the protagonists discuss, for example, their scientific preferences and the merits of Aristotle, Plato, and Descartes, as well as their aspirations to perform experiments: Molière “Les femmes savantes,” act 3, scene 2, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Maurice Rat, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 2:741–822, here pp. 783–84.

27. Hélène Merlin and Dinah Ribard, “Enfin vinrent Malherbe, Galilée, Descartes… Périodisation littéraire et périodisation culturelle : problèmes théoriques, problèmes historiques,” Littératures classiques 34 (1998): 47–71, here pp. 49–51.

28. Nicolas Boileau, “L’art poétique,” in Œuvres complètes, 157–85, here pp. 160 and 167.

29. Beyond Merlin and Ribard, “Enfin vinrent Malherbe, Galilée, Descartes…,” see Schneider, Dignified Retreat, 46–50.

30. Letter from Guez de Balzac to Boisrobert, November 1623, in Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Les premières lettres de Guez de Balzac, 1618–1627, ed. H. Bibas and K.-T. Butler (Paris: Droz, 1933), 1:143–48, here p. 147; Merlin and Ribard, “Enfin vinrent Malherbe, Galilée, Descartes…,” 52. For a pithy discussion, see also Mathilde Bombart, “Des écritures en polémique : autour de la querelle des Lettres de Guez de Balzac (1624–1630),” Littératures classiques 59 (2006): 173–91.

31. Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, “‘Le plus éloquent philosophe des derniers temps’. Les stratégies d’auteur de René Descartes,” Annales HSS 49, no. 2 (1994): 349–67.

32. Jean du Hamel, Réflexions critique sur le système cartésien de la philosophie de Mr. Régis (Paris: Edme Couterot, 1692), 3–4. Probably Molière’s most poignant satire of university protocols is the finale to the Malade imaginaire (1673), which sees Argan admitted to the community of medical doctors. See further Harcourt Brown, Science and the Human Comedy: Natural Philosophy in French Literature from Rabelais to Maupertuis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 91–98.

33. Jean-Baptiste de La Grange, Les principes de la philosophie contre les nouveaux philosophes Descartes, Rohault, Regius, Gassendi, le P. Maignan, &c. (Paris: Georges Josse, 1675), 42–44.

34. Ibid., 49–65. Dinah Ribard highlights the importance of the transition from oral lecture to the written form in “La science comme littérature à l’époque moderne,” Littératures classiques 85, no. 3 (2014): 135–52, here p. 141.

35. Pascal Duris, Quelle révolution scientifique ? Les sciences de la vie dans la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, xvi^e – xviii^e siècles (Paris: Hermann, 2016). See also Sophie Roux, “De la nouveauté à l’âge classique,” in Concepts, cultures et progrès scientifiques et techniques, Enseignement et perspectives, ed. Gérard Pajonk (Paris: Éd. du CTHS, 2009), 79–90. For the broader debate on innovation or continuity in seventeenth-century science, see John L. Heilbron, “Was There a Scientific Revolution?” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics, ed. Jed Z. Buchwald and Robert Fox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7–24; Stéphane Van Damme, “Un ancien régime des sciences et des savoirs,” in Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, vol. 1, De la Renaissance aux Lumières, ed. Stéphane Van Damme (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2015), 19–20.

36. As John Henry remarked, studies that focus on the “technical and intellectual content of the sciences” can show continuities with the past, whereas discontinuities are much more visible in the social history of the early modern period: Henry, “Science and the Scientific Revolution,” in Encyclopedia of European Social History: From 1350 to 2000, ed. Peter N. Stearns (Detroit: C. Scribner’s Sons, 2001), 2:77–94, here p. 78.

37. See the broad statement in Roger Chartier, “Le monde comme représentation,” Annales ESC 44, no. 6 (1989): 1505–20.

38. Cited in Roger Ariew, “Damned If You Do: Cartesians and Censorship, 1663–1706,” Perspectives on Science 2, no. 3 (1994): 255–74, here pp. 257–58; translation slightly amended based on Francisque Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 3rd ed. (1842; Paris: Ch. Delagrave et cie, 1868), 1:469.

39. Sophie Roux, “The Condemnations of Cartesian Natural Philosophy under Louis XIV (1661–91),” in The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, ed. Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz, and Delphine Antoine-Mahut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 755–79, esp. pp. 756–65; more broadly, Stéphane Van Damme, Descartes. Essai d’histoire culturelle d’une grandeur philosophique (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2002).

40. [François Bernier], Requeste des maistres ès arts, professeurs, et régens de l’Université de Paris […] (Delphy [sic, for Delphi]: Societé des imprimeurs ordinaires de la Cour de Parnasse [fictional address], 1671).

41. Nicholas Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 131; Faith E. Beasley, Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bernier, Marguerite de La Sablière, and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-Century France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), esp. chaps. 1 and 2 for Bernier’s milieu in the 1670s, though the Arrêt is not discussed.

42. Jean Luc Robin, “L’Indiscipline de l’Arrêt burlesque et les deux voies de la légitimation du discours scientifique,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 29, no. 1 (2007): 101–11, here p. 107. On the text, see Brown, Science and the Human Comedy, 102–105; Gad Freudenthal, “Littérature et sciences de la nature en France au début du xviii^e siècle : Pierre Polinière, l’introduction de l’enseignement de la physique expérimentale, à l’Université de Paris et l’Arrêt burlesque de Boileau,” Revue de Synthèse 99–100 (1980): 267–95.

43. Boileau rewrote the text in 1701, as his eighteenth-century editor explained in Nicolas Boileau, “Arret burlesque, donné en la grand’chambre du Parnasse […],” in Œuvres de Mr. Boileau Despréaux […] (Geneva: Fabri et Barrillot, 1716), 2:237–42, here p. 237.

44. For Duris, this text “provides a rather precise overview of the principal personalities and discoveries claimed by modern science in the last third of the seventeenth century”: Duris, Quelle révolution scientifique ? 203–209, here p. 204.

45. [Bernier], Requeste des maistres ès arts, 7–8.

46. Boileau, “Arrêt burlesque,” in Œuvres complètes, 325–30, here pp. 327–28.

47. Ibid., 328.

48. [Bernier], preface to Requeste des maistres ès arts, 3–4.

49. Nicolas Boileau, Œuvres diverses du Sr Boileau Despréaux, avec le Traité du sublime, ou du merveilleux dans le discours […] (Paris: Denys Thierry, 1701), 292.

50. [Bernier], Requeste des maistres ès arts, 4.

51. Ibid., 9.

52. François Bernier, Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi, 8 vols. (Lyon: Anyson et Posuel, 1678).

53. Gabriel Guéret, La guerre des autheurs anciens et modernes, avec la Requeste et arrest en faveur d’Aristote (La Haye: Arnoult Leers, 1671); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, R-9438, [François Bernier], Requeste des maistres ès arts, professeurs et régents de l’Université de Paris […] (Libreville: Jacques Le Franc, 1702), pp. 13 and 15 for the updates to the 1671 version. (The place of publication [“Freetown”] and the printer [“Candid Jacques”] were obviously invented to protect the printer behind this pirated edition.) A stand-alone edition from 1674 quite probably existed, but it seems impossible to locate in public collections. The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library in Hanover holds a copy (Lr 8049) apparently published in 1672, testifying to the probable existence of yet another edition.

54. Arrêt burlesque donné sur requête et par défaut en la grand’chambre du Parnasse Ilinois et Huron […] (s.l.: L’imprimerie de la Cour, 1770), satirizing Jacques C. François de La Perrière de Roiffé, Nouvelle physique céleste et terrestre […], 3 vols. (Paris: Delalain, 1766); Requête burlesque, et arrêt de la Cour du Parlement, concernant la suppression du magnétisme animal (s.l. [Paris]: s.n., 1785).

55. As can be seen, for example, in Nicolas Boileau and Jacques de Losme de Montchesnay, Bolaeana, ou Bons mots de M. Boileau […] (Amsterdam: Lhonoré, 1742). The shorter Boileau version was also included in a publication by an opponent of Descartes, who used it to document the unjustified abuse heaped on the University of Paris by the philosopher’s supporters: François Babin, Journal ou Relation fidelle de tout ce qui s’est passé dans l’Université d’Angers au sujet de la philosophie de Des Carthes […] (s.l.: s.n., 1679), 18–19.

56. I am quoting the expanded edition of 1702: Gabriel Daniel, Voyage du monde de Descartes (Paris: Nicolas Pépie, 1702). On the text, see Merlin and Ribard, “Enfin vinrent Malherbe, Galilée, Descartes…,” 60–68; Jean-Luc Solère, “Un récit de philosophie-fiction : Le Voyage du monde de Descartes du Père Gabriel Daniel,” Uranie. Mythes et littératures 4 (1994): 153–84; Nicolas Corréard, “Voyager dans le monde des idées : le roman de la philosophie naturelle selon Margaret Cavendish et Gabriel Daniel,” xvii^e siècle 280 (2018): 411–32; Justin Smith, “Gabriel Daniel: Descartes through the Mirror of Fiction,” in Nadler, Schmaltz, and Antoine-Mahut, The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, 791–803.

57. Daniel, Voyage du monde de Descartes, 346.

58. Ibid., 343–53, citation p. 348.

59. As widely demonstrated by L. W. B. Brockliss, for example in “Aristotle, Descartes and the New Science: Natural Philosophy at the University of Paris, 1600–1740,” Annals of Science 38, no. 1 (1981): 33–69. For a review of the debate on the relation of universities to early modern science, especially in the English context, see Mordechai Feingold, “Between Teaching and Research: The Place of Science in Early Modern English Universities,” in The Institutionalization of Science in Early Modern Europe, ed. Mordechai Feingold and Giulia Giannini (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 3–19.

60. Daniel acknowledged the existence of the moons of Jupiter in his description of the building of Descartes’s world, but did not elaborate on the context of their discovery: Daniel, Voyage du monde de Descartes, 321.

61. The Jesuits recognized the phases of Venus by 1611, nine years before they formally accepted Tychonic models, in spite of their devastating potential for geocentric models: Mario Biagioli, Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 155, n. 33.

62. This is the main subject of book 5: Daniel, Voyage du monde de Descartes, 427–516. An early version of this section appeared as Nouvelles difficultez proposées par un péripatéticien à l’auteur du “Voyage du monde de Descartes.” Touchant la connoissance des bestes […] (Paris: Vve de S. Benard, 1693). This text was published anonymously, but Barbier has very plausibly identified Daniel as the author: Antoine-Alexandre Barbier, Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes, 3rd ed., 4 vols. (Paris: Paul Daffis, 1872–1879), 3:569–70.

63. Daniel, Voyage du monde de Descartes, 175.

64. Ibid., 343.

65. Ibid., 342–45.

66. Merlin and Ribard, “Enfin vinrent Malherbe, Galilée, Descartes…,” 60.

67. M. G. de l’A. [Pierre-Daniel Huet], Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du cartésianisme (s.l.: s.n., 1692). On Huet’s “throwing in the towel” and his turn to “ridicule, hyperbole, and abusive ad hominem attacks” in the Nouveaux mémoires, see Thomas M. Lennon, “Pierre-Daniel Huet, Skeptic Critic of Cartesianism and Defender of Religion,” in Nadler, Schmaltz, and Antoine-Mahut, The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, 780–90, here p. 787.

68. Daniel, Voyage du monde de Descartes, 258.

69. Ibid., 254–57 and 271–79.

70. Ibid., 261–69, here p. 268. For Pascal’s biography, see Gilberte Périer, “La vie de Monsieur Pascal, écrite par Madame Périer, sa sœur,” in Blaise Pascal, Œuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Chevalier (Paris: NRF, 1954), 3–34, here pp. 4–5 for the anecdote on the young Pascal’s spontaneous reconstruction of Euclid’s first thirty-two propositions.

71. Gabriel Daniel, Entretiens de Cleandre et d’Eudoxe, sur les “Lettres au Provincial” (Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1694), esp. 2–9 for the reaction to Perrault. The name Pierre Marteau was conventionally used for pirated or unlicensed editions.

72. [Pasquier Quesnel], Le roman séditieux du Nestorianisme renaissant […] (s.l.: s.n., [1693]), 1; [Gabriel Daniel], Lettre apologétique de l’auteur du “Voyage du monde de Descartes,” accusé faussement dans un écrit intitulé “Le roman séditieux, etc.” […] (s.l.: s.n., 1693). On the broader context for these polemics, see Jean-Pascal Gay, Morales en conflit. Théologie et polémique au Grand Siècle, 1640–1700 (Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 2011).

73. Gabriel Daniel, A Voyage to the World of Cartesius, trans. T. Taylor (London: Thomas Bennet, 1692); Nicolas Malebranche, Father Malebranche his Treatise Concerning the Search after the Truth […], [1664–1675], trans. T. Taylor (London: W. Boyer et al., 1700).

74. Augustin de Backer, Bibliothèque des écrivains de la Compagnie de Jésus, ou Notices bibliographiques (Liège: Impr. de L. Grandmont-Donders, 1853), 1:241; Francisco Aguilar Piñal, Bibliografía de autores españoles del siglo xviii (Madrid: Instituto de filología Miguel de Cervantes, 1981), 1:151.

75. Christiaan Huygens, Œuvres complètes, 22 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888–1950), 9:301–302. Neither the original letter nor the reply has been preserved. Huygens’s notes for a reply state the thesis of his presumed correspondent, in all probability Perrault.

76. Ibid.

77. Charles Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes en ce qui regarde les Arts et les Sciences […], 4 vols. (Paris: Veuve J.-B. Coignard et J.-B. Coignard fils, 1688–1697).

78. Sara E. Melzer, Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 125.

79. Cited in Larry F. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 40; compare Duris, Quelle révolution scientifique ? 251–57, and 262–66 more broadly on Perrault’s Parallèle.

80. Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, preface to vol. 2 (non-paginated); see also the preface to volume 4.

81. Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, 4:123–230, specifically 182–230 on the souls of animals and the relation of this question to reason.

82. Among many possible references, see Ingrid D. Rowland and Noah Charney, The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2017); Dániel Margócsy, “The Global Reception of Stradanus and the Political Use of the Nova Reperta,” in Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s “Nova Reperta,” ed. Lia Markey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 115–33. On scientific patronage, see Aurélien Ruellet, La maison de Salomon. Histoire du patronage scientifique et technique en France et en Angleterre au xvii^e siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016).

83. For conflicting interpretations of the importance of truth versus utility to patrons in the paradigmatic case of Galileo, see Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. chap. 1; Robert S. Westman, The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), esp. 436–40. For the constitutive tension between contemplation of natural truths and scientific utility, see Peter Dear, “What Is the History of Science the History Of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science,” Isis 96, no. 3 (2005): 390–406.

84. Bernard Lamy, Entretiens sur les sciences […], ed. François Girbal and Pierre Clair (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1966), 256. On Lamy’s expulsion from teaching, see Fred Ablondi, “Bernard Lamy, Empiricism, and Cartesianism,” History of European Ideas 44, no. 2 (2018): 149–58, here pp. 152–53.

85. Lamy, Entretiens sur les sciences, 257–59.

86. Ibid., 256.

87. For a broad survey of the problem, see Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture,” History of Science 32, no. 3 (1994): 237–67; contrast Emma C. Spary, Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

88. Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, 4:62, 265, 276, and 290.

89. [Bernier], Requeste des maistres ès arts, 8. Though Charles Perrault tried to present Claude as an authority on ancient music, he is mostly known today as an architect and member of the Parisian Academy of Sciences.

90. For a different reading of the aesthetic role of technology in the text, see Anthony Saudrais, “Le pouvoir de la mécanique et la mécanique du pouvoir. Le progrès technique dans l’imaginaire de Charles Perrault,” in Bahier-Porte and Reguig, Anciens et Modernes face aux pouvoirs, 287–302.

91. Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, 4:178–81.

92. Rabinovitch, The Perraults, 106–10.

93. See more broadly the burgeoning scholarship on literature and science, for instance Frédérique Aït-Touati, Contes de la Lune. Essai sur la fiction et la science modernes (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), and the approaches highlighted in Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribbles, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

94. Charles Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Paris: Vve J.-B. Coignard et J.-B. Coignard fils, 1692–1693), published simultaneously with the third volume of the first edition.

95. For his obituaries, see Mercure galant (May 1703): 232–53; Abbé Tallemant, “Eloge funèbre de Mr. Perrault,” in Recueil des harangues prononcées par Messieurs de l’Académie françoise dans leurs réceptions, & en d’autres occasions differentes, depuis l’establissement de l’Académie jusqu’à présent (Amsterdam: Aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1709), 2:591–602; Journal des sçavans (March 10, 1704): 174–76.

96. Ribard, Raconter, vivre, penser; Rabinovitch, The Perraults, 17–19.

97. I. Bernard Cohen, “The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Concept of Scientific Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37, no. 2 (1976): 257–88. Continuities with the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns are suggested in Catherine Fricheau, “Des Modernes aux Encyclopédistes. Le bon sens de l’idée de progrès ?” Dix-huitième siècle 40, no. 1 (2008): 543–59.

98. Louis Moréri, Le grand dictionnaire historique, ou le Mélange curieux de l’histoire sacrée et profane […] (Lyon: Jean Girin et Barthelemy Rivière, 1683); Moréri, Le grand dictionnaire historique […] Nouvelle édition (Paris: Les libraires associés, 1759); Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, “Discours préliminaire des éditeurs,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (University of Chicago, ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, Autumn 2017 edition, ed. Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu), vol. 1, i–xlv.

99. See, for example, Lissa Roberts and Simon Schaffer, preface to The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation, ed. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam: Koninkliijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007), xiii–xiv.

100. See the indication in Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain, 306, column 9 of the table.

101. Newton was known quite early to French scholars, but he only came to symbolize recent scientific achievement after 1730: J. B. Shank, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Shank, Before Voltaire. On Newton in the context of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, see Christoph Lehner and Helge Wendt, “Mechanics in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes,” Isis 108, no. 1 (2017): 26–39.

102. For examples, which though current scholarship would dispute them still illustrate this type of question, see Ben-David, The Scientist’s Role in Society, 64–65 (for the decline of Italian science in the seventeenth century) or 97–100 (on the importance of Enlightenment dynamics, rather than Revolutionary or Napoleonic reforms, for the success of French science in the first decades of the nineteenth century).

103. Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World, 565–94; Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 161–65.

104. Perhaps also because such texts do not conform to the “textbooks” that, according to the influential formulation by Thomas S. Kuhn, were the most basic way of transmitting a newly established paradigm: Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (1962; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 136–43.

105. See, for example, the broad overview in Paul A. David, “The Historical Origins of ‘Open Science’: An Essay on Patronage, Reputation and Common Agency Contracting in the Scientific Revolution,” Capitalism and Society 3, no. 2 (2008): https://doi.org/10.2202/1932-0213.1040.