The Heavens Inscribed: the instrumental poetry of the Virgin in early modern France

Abstract

AbstractThe expert in the early modern period was frequently looked upon with suspicion. Though expertise was associated with specialized knowledge and skill, it was also associated with cunning, deception and social climbing. Indeed, such knowledge threatened well-defined and time-honoured social and disciplinary boundaries. This was certainly the case with practical mathematics, which was considered by many to be an inferior grade of knowledge, especially when compared with natural philosophy and theology. This spawned numerous attempts to elevate the status of practical mathematics and to lend legitimacy to its practitioners. This article focuses on one such attempt, that of an early sixteenth-century French cosmographer–explorer–poet named Pierre Crignon. Crignon participated in voyages of exploration and was renowned as a cosmographer and navigator, but his contemporaries perhaps best knew him as a poet. The paper examines how Crignon attempted to bring together and legitimate the disparate forms of his expertise as a navigator, cosmographer, humanist poet and theologian through the multivalent medium of his poetry, and in particular through a poem comparing the Virgin Mary to the astrolabe.