The title of this chapter may appear doubly anachronistic. On the one hand, the word aesthetics was first used by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten only in 1735. On the other, the philosophy of beauty and taste that it came to designate relates to a ‘system of the arts’ (literature, music, sculpture, architecture, painting centrally – with theatre and dance) that itself has been held not to have been established until well into the eighteenth century. No doubt the elements, theory, and practice that constituted the system developed over many years. But it is not evident that they owe anything very specific to ‘Cartesianism’ – let alone to René Descartes – and terms like ‘Cartesian aesthetics’ have mostly meant vague ideas about the adoption of certain concepts as source of inspiration and artistic guide. The intention of this chapter is quite different. First, it will show that sixteenth-century debates in what were once the sciences of the quadrivium raised most of the issues basic to what we now call aesthetics. Second, it will show that Descartes picked up these issues, giving them large place in his work: whence they became typical of debate about art in his time. So it will propose, thirdly, that the meaning of later aesthetic argument is seen more clearly through this Cartesian lens. In the eighteenth century Descartes's greatest impact may well have been in aesthetics. He ‘was not a man of letters’, wrote Edward Gibbon in 1761, ‘but literature is under deep obligation to him’.

To deal briefly and justly with tragedy from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century in Europe is not easy. In wit and fecundity of critical debate, variety and brilliance of practice, and unusual abundance of both, these years are exceptional in the record of any artistic production. One might think tragedy so rare an occurrence – fifth-century Athens, Renaissance Europe, Enlightenment Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia – as to be a narrow endeavour, easy to epitomize. Renaissance tragedy, however, was so fundamental to the establishment of vernaculars, the development of literature, the making of national theatres, to political, religious, educational, and epistemological debate, indeed, to the ‘passage to modernity’, as to make its study central to any understanding of modern Western culture. In tragedy, humanists found a tie with a striking grandeur of the ancients. To imitate it seemed a way to grasp their most solemn thoughts and inhabit their deepest emotions. It was an art form old but unfamiliar; it offered a kind of acid test for claims of renewal. Those who suggested tragedy to be familiar and local provoked vehement debate.

Explaining tragedy to the reader of his French translation of Electra in 1537, the French scholar and diplomat, Lazare de Baïf, called it ‘a morality composed of great calamities, murders, and adversities inflicted on noble and excellent personages’. In 1548 Thomas Sebillet averred that ‘French morality in a way substitutes for Greek and Latin tragedy, especially in that it treats serious and princely deeds. And if the French had agreed that morality were always to end in grief and unhappiness, morality would be tragedy.’

The matter of this volume, which attempts to give part of an explanation for the vehemence of debates about ‘method’, the deep change in nature of the attention paid to language, and the concomitant rise in importance of mathematics as a science of discovery in the European sixteenth century, has been in my mind for many years now. My debt to friends, colleagues, commentators and opponents is considerable. In earlier books, I have discussed the process and ‘meaning’ of apparently dramatic changes in discourses of what was afterwards called ‘literature’, trying to catch something of the complexity of these changes as well as the continuities that they nevertheless maintain. This book and its companion, on the historically vexed and theoretically fraught issues of subject and self, take on two of the more controversial areas of consideration: controversial both for those who argued and fought about them in the late fifteenth century, through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth, and for intellectual historiography today.

Since Jules Michelet (La Renaissance, 1855), Jacob Burckhardt (Die Zivilisation der Renaissance in Italien, 1860), and Walter Pater (Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1873), this era in European history has been defined above all in terms of three main elements, one historiographical, the second ‘psychological’, the third philosophical.

In the 1610s the French architect, engineer, musician and scholar Salomon de Caus was organizing the marvels of Heidelberg Castle for Frederick and Elizabeth Palatine, future parents of that Princess Elisabeth who a generation later was to be so important for Descartes' thinking. By 1621 Caus had to leave the Palatinate, subject now to destruction by the very army of which Descartes had been a part in 1619/20. Caus eventually ended up at the court of France. Descartes was to spend many years near and as a frequenter of the Palatine court in exile at The Hague. These overlaps are especially intriguing because of another. In 1615, just three years before Descartes wrote the Compendium, Caus issued his Institution harmonique.

This work simply took for granted the various elements we have explored : ‘Music is a science by which low and high sounds, proportional to one another and divided by just intervals, are so disposed that sense and reason are satisfied’. This definition was preceded by a brief history, as in Zarlino, and followed by an exploration of the intervals and proportions in question, as well as their composition. To define music thus as a theoretical science dealing with the organization of sounds so as to satisfy ‘sense and reason’ obviously owed everything to Zarlino and the tradition culminating in his work.

That there was a general reorganization of education and its disciplinary divisions from the late Middle Ages into the period we now call the ‘Renaissance’ has long been a historiographical commonplace, although the precise nature of the changes varied from place to place. In the Italian universities, for example, the artes liberates of trivium and quadrivium became a sort of propaedeutic to the advanced university faculties of law and medicine, while in Paris the faculties of arts, medicine and theology remained distinct. Then, too, if these did not give way to the stadia humanitatis of the humanist educational system - grammar, eloquence, poetry, history and moral philosophy - yet they did find themselves increasingly in competition with and affected by humanist schools and colleges from early in the sixteenth century (no doubt starting with Sturm in Strasbourg, and then reaching a peak on the Continent with the spread of the Jesuit colleges).

The situation of mathematical, logical and musical studies in schooling, as much in the Middle Ages as in the Renaissance, is for the most part rather unclear, although they did play a greater or lesser role after the stadia humanitatis course (even if most advances happened, we have seen, outside the schools). What I wish to address is surely connected to these shifts, but should not be confused with them. Music was thus centrally important in the old quadrivium.