1. Members of Descartes’s family bore titles such as ecuyer (squire), and they clearly thought they deserved that status: it may have been the lowest of noble titles, but a noble title nonetheless; they later gained the right to use the term chevalier (knight). The family’s coat of arms and title of chevalier are clearly evident in the engraving of Gerard Edelinck, printed as the frontispiece for Adrien Baillet, La Vie De Monsieur Des-Cartes, 2 vols. (Paris: Chez D. Horthemels, 1691).
2. On his learning to ride the “great horse,” see Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:35; for habits of dress and love of jokes, see Charles Adam, ed., Vie et Oeuvres de Descartes: Étude historique; Supplément a l’édition de Descartes, vol. 12 of Oeuvres De Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: L. Cerf, 1910), 74; for his love of ancient mythology, not for its lessons but for its rousing stories, see Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:19–20; on his gambling, see Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:36. For the “fundamentally social” aims of Descartes’s philosophy, see Peter Dear, “A Mechanical Microcosm: Bodily Passions, Good Manners, and Cartesian Mechanism,” in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, ed. Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 51–82.
3. Poisson writes that the papers were now in the hands of M. Clerselier (whom we will encounter subsequently): Nicholas-Joseph Poisson, Commentaire ou remarques sur la methode de René Descartes (1670; New York: Garland, 1987), 20–21. Also at Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, eds., Oeuvres de Descartes, 12 vols. (Paris: L. Cerf, 1897–1910), 10:255–56.
4. Pierre Borel, The Life of the Most Famous Philosopher Renatus Descartes (London: E. Okes et al., 1670), 7.
5. Stephen Snelders, Vrijbuiters van de heelkunde: Op zoek naar medische kennis in de tropen 1600–1800 (Amsterdam/Antwerp: Atlas, 2012).
6. “Verae philosophiae, quam vocat operam navantium”: from Beeckman’s 1628 “Historia” of his relationship with Descartes, in C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, 10:332; the second metaphor is from the Discours; see John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, eds., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–1991), 1:145.
7. Amadis of Gaul, Books I and II, ed. Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, trans. Edwin B. Place and Herbert C. Behm (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 11. On Descartes’s acquaintance with Amadis and other romances, see C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 73.
8. C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, 10:538. On a lost treatise on fencing written by Descartes, see Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:35.
9. Borel, Renatus Descartes, 6–7.
10. Jeroen van de Ven, “Quelques données nouvelles sur Helena Jans,” Bulletin Cartésien 31 (2003): 10–12.
11. Adam (Vie et Oeuvres, 236) thinks this must be the Duchesse d’Aiguillon; but it is an inference of Adam’s from a reference in a letter of Descartes to Mersenne of 25 May 1637, thanking him for getting the permission to publish the Discours, being particularly indebted “à cette Dame qui vous a écrit, de ce qu’il luy plaist juger de moy si favorablement” (“To a certain lady who wrote to you, of which she was pleased to judge of me so favorably”) (C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, 1:376). It might be another noble woman.
12. Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
13. Louis Batiffol, The Duchesse de Chevreuse: A Life of Intrigue and Adventure in the Days of Louis XIII (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1914). The text in the upper left of figure 2 states, “Ce cerf a esté laissé courre et pris au mont temery par charles duc de lorraine et de barle 15 julllet 1627” (“This deer has been hunted and taken on leash at Mont Temery by Charles duc de Lorraine and Barle, 15 July 1627”). Charles of Lorraine and the duchesse (then married to Charles’s brother) were lovers at the time, so the portrait is clearly metaphorical. They were also plotting against Richelieu, and the timing coincides with Buckingham’s landing on the Isle de Ré, leading to the siege of La Rochelle. The reference to Mont Temery is likely to be to a rise southeast of Cherbourg.
14. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: His Life and Thought, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 25, wrestles with this but concludes that it was not exceptional.
15. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:168.
16. Maxime Leroy, Descartes: Le Philosophe au Masque (Paris: Rieder, 1929), 25, 108; René Pintard, Le Libertinage Érudit dans la Première Moitié du XVIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Boivin, 1943), 203–4.
17. Gustave Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande dans le Première Moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Édouard Champion, 1920), 636.
18. Theo Verbeek, ed., La Querelle d’Utrecht: René Descartes et Martin Schoock (Paris: Les impressions nouvelles, 1988), 33; the treatise in question was the Admiranda Methodus of Martinus Schoock, translated in full into French at 157–320.
19. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 25; Nicholas Hammond, Gossip, Sexuality and Scandal in France (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011); for the earlier example of Florence, Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); for a sensitive account of mainly English examples, see Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
20. From the Passions (1649), in Cottingham, Studoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:357.
21. Mitchell Greenberg, Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 1: “L’Astrée and Androgyny,” 24–47; also see the introduction to Honoré d’ Urfé, Astrea (Part One), ed. and trans. Steven Rendall (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995); and Leah DeVun, “The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (2008): 193–218.
22. Walther P. Fischer, The Literary Relations Between La Fontaine and the “Astrée” of Honoré D’ Urfé (Philadelphia: Publications of the University of Pennsylvania Series in Romanic Languages and Literatures, 1913), 6.
23. The usual account was told since the first biography, by Borel (Renatus Descartes, 25); for a revised view of his meetings with the queen, see Susanna Åkerman, Queen Christina of Sweden and Her Circle: The Transformation of a Seventeenth-Century Philosophical Libertine (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), 49; on the rumors of poisoning, see Åkerman, Queen Christina, 51; a recent argument in favor of the hypothesis, which I have not seen, is Theodor Ebert, Der rätselhafte tod des René Descartes (2009).
24. Thomas M. Lennon, ed., Against Cartesian Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003), 31–32. The rumor may have been abroad from the time of his death, since Christiaan Huygens told Baillet that the Gazette d’Anvers [Antwerp] reported that a madman had died in Sweden so that Descartes could live as long as he wished: G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 404–5, quoting C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, 5:630.
25. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 4.
26. Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Françoise Viatte, Dominique Cordellier, and Violaine Jeammet, eds., Masques Mascarades Mascarons (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2014).
27. Anthony Studler van Zurck (who will be discussed subsequently), served as an early drop box for Mersenne.
28. See Edelinck’s engraving, figure 1; he quotes it as his motto in a letter of 1634 to Mersenne (Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:43).
29. It also appeared inscribed on one of the “indecent” or “bawdye” paintings of Johannes Torrentius, from the 1620s: A. Bredius, Johannes Torrentius Schilder, 1589–1644 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1909), 9.
30. John W. Montgomery, Cross and Crucible: Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654): Phoenix of the Theologians, 2 vols. (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973).
31. For a summary of the possibility of Descartes’ Rosicrucian associations, see William R. Shea, “Descartes and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment,” in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Essays in Honour of Gerd Buchdahl, ed. R. S. Woolhouse (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 73–99.
32. Gabriel Daniel, A Voyage to the World of Cartesius. Written Originally in French, trans. T. Taylor (London: Thomas Bennet, 1692), 14–21; called belladonna.
33. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:111. On his self-conscious crafting of his work, knowing that not everyone would welcome his conclusions, see Amy Mullin, “If Truth Were Like Money: Descartes and His Readers,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 19 (2002): 149–69.
34. Quoted in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:111, although I have substituted “person” for “man.”
35. Ibid., 1:112.
36. Ibid., 3:52, letter of February 27, 1637.
37. Baillet, Des-Cartes, xxviii–xxx.
38. See the introduction to Theo Verbeek, Erik-Jan Bos, and Jeroen van de Ven, eds., The Correspondence of René Descartes 1643 (Utrecht: Zeno, 2003).
39. On Hogelande’s alchemical work, see Bernard Joly, Descartes et la Chimie (Paris: J. Vrin, 2011), 67–69.
40. Quoted from René Descartes to Cornelis van Hogelande, 30 August 1649, in Baillet, Des-Cartes, xxviii–xxix.
41. On De Raey’s opinion about the letters: “trés petit nombre & de peu d’importance: & que M. Descartes avoit emporté les principaux en Suéde,” ibid., xxviii. For his comment on the French, see ibid., xxx.
42. C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, 5:406–9; G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 677; the amount was the huge sum of 9,000 livres of Dutch money, the equivalent of 10,500 livres of French money. Van Zurck also possessed a copy of the manuscript later published by Schouten as De Homine: see G. A. Lindeboom, Florentius Schuyl (1619–1669) en zijn Betekenis voor het Cartensianisme in de Geneeskunde (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 70.
43. Verbeek, Bos, and van de Ven, Correspondence 1643, xi–xv.
44. “M. [Johannes] de Raey pouroit bien avoir été cet ami discret à qui M. de Hooghelande auroit fait lire des lettres avant que de les brüler: & si elles n’ont pas été brülées, il n’y a peut-ëtre eu que la crainte de les rendre utiles au Public qui luy en a fait faire un mystére à M. Van Limborch.” Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:xxviii–xxix.
45. C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, 10:1–14.
46. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:xvi–xxi; also see John R. Cole, The Olympian Dreams and Youthful Rebellion of René Descartes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 21–30.
47. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:xxxi.
48. Leibniz’s Cogitationes privatae of 1676, in which he took extensive notes on Descartes’s now missing “Little Notebook” (or Olympica), as paraphrased and translated in Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:50–51, 81–86: all versions are in Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, 10:5–12 (Chanut), 211–19 (Leibniz), and 179–88 (Baillet).
49. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:xiv–xv; also see Adrien Baillet, Jugemens des Savans sur les Principaux Ouvrages des Auteurs, 7 vols. (Paris: Charles Moette et al., 1722), 1:19, where he says that Lipstorp came to Paris for several years and knew Baillet well, giving him everything he published and much else, including a work on how to decode the scriptures for prognostication, which Baillet translated into French in 1688.
50. Baillet, Des-Cartes t, xv–xvi; Borel also published Discours nouveau prouvant la pluralité des mondes, arguing that the moon and stars were inhabited; this is an Epicurean many-worlds theory, further suggesting why he was interested in Descartes’s philosophy.
51. Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 43.
52. See Baillet, Des-Cartes, xii–xiii.
53. Charles Adam thought that Baillet had access to memoirs of Descartes left by Clerselier, Chanut, Mydorge, Hardy, La Vasseur, De la Barre, and Auzout (Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, v).
54. Baillet, Jugemens des Savans, the “Abregé de la vie de Mr. Baillet” by B. La Monnoye is 1:3–28.
55. Baillet, Des-Cartes; Adrien Baillet, The Life of Monsieur Des Cartes, Containing the History of His Philosophy and Works, trans. S. R. (London: Printed for R. Simpson, at the Harp in St. Paul’s Church-yard, 1693); also see the appreciation of Baillet in Cole, Olympian Dreams, 41–48.
56. Verbeek, Bos, and van de Ven, Correspondence 1643, xxiv–xxv; also Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, iii–v.
57. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, xvi; Åkerman, Queen Christina, 35.
58. Alain Tallon, La Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement (1629–1667): Spiritualité et Société (Paris: Cerf, 1990), 108.
59. Ibid., 119; Benoist Pierre, La Monarchie ecclésiale: Le clergé de cour en France à l’époque moderne (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2013), 350.
60. Ruth Kleinman, Anne of Austria: Queen of France (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 253.
61. René de Voyer d’Argenson, Annales de la Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, ed. H. Beauchet-Filleau (Marseille: Saint-Léon, 1900); Raoul Allier, La Cabale de Dévots: 1627–1666 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1902).
62. Baillet, Des-Cartes, dedication.
63. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, xiii, notes that because of this criticism of sources, Baillet was suspected by the Jesuits of being a Jansenist.
64. On the Jugements des Savans, see April Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 170; for his meditations on authorial disguise, see Nick Wilding, Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 129; for evidence of Baillet as a copyist, Cole, Olympian Dreams, 41–48.
65. The Mersenne correspondence was published in seventeen volumes between 1932 and 1987.
66. The recent edition of the Descartes correspondence is being produced through the Circulation of Knowledge project in the Netherlands under the editorial supervision of Eric-Jan Bos and can be accessed through the Early Modern Letters Online project hosted by Oxford University: http://emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/?catalogue=rene-descartes#partners.
67. For instance, the edition reprinted by Vrin in 1964.
68. The quotation comes from a philosopher who came to be quite unhappy with modernism: Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 108.
69. Roger Ariew et al., eds., Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003).
70. Ibid., all quotations from 3–4.
71. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Biographie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995); Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought.
72. Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); see also Desmond Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Daniel Garber, Descartes Embodied: Reading Cartesian Philosophy through Cartesian Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and especially John Andrew Schuster, Descartes-Agonistes: Physico-Mathematics, Method and Corpuscular-Mechanism 1618–33 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013). For example, see Gaukroger’s Descartes, 6; he also—correctly, in my opinion—chastises Alexandre Koyré for trying to turn the history of science into the history of epistemology (p. 14). For a similar attack on the history of science as metaphysics, see Gary Hatfield, “Metaphysics and the New Science,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
73. Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 56–62. Adam discusses the ceremony and the poem (Vie et Oeuvres, 28–31), although he does not attribute it to Descartes. Rodis-Lewis (Descartes: Life and Thought, 14) considers Toulmin’s attribution “plausible.”
74. A. C. Grayling, Descartes: The Life of René Descartes and Its Place in His Times (London: Pocket Books, 2006), 9, 11.
75. Ibid., 46–47.
76. J. P. D. Cooper, The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (London: Faber, 2012); more generally, James Westfall Thompson and Saul Kussiel Padover, Secret Diplomacy: Espionage and Cryptography, 1500–1815 (New York: F. Ungar, 1963).
77. Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Filippo De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
78. H. R. Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore De Mayerne (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); John Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Pamela Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Alice Stroup, “Nicolas Hartsoeker, savant Hollandias associé de l’académie et espion de Louis XIV,” in De la diffusion des sciences à l’espionnage industriel XVe–XXe siècle, ed. André Guillerme (1999); “Voltaire, agent secret du roi,” Histoire Pour Tous, February 6, 2013, http://www.histoire-pour-tous.fr/histoire-de-france/4464-voltaire-agent-secret-du-roi.html; Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 314–19.
79. Marika Keblusek and Badeloch Noldus, eds., Double Agents: Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe (Boston: Brill, 2011).
80. Richard Watson, Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes (Boston: David R. Godine, 2002).
81. G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 645; Frederick Henry had died on March 14, 1647.
82. Herbert H. Rowen, John de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, 1625–1672 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 45.
83. While working on a previous book, which included a chapter on Descartes (Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007]), I also came to think that he might have been a spy, and around 2002 I spoke to friends in London about it; I later gave papers on the possibility, in Utrecht and the Renaissance Society of America. These were early steps toward this work.
84. Grayling, Descartes: Life and Its Place, 11.
85. Ibid.
86. Watson, Cogito, 22–23, writing in the tradition of Leroy, Descartes: Philosophe au Masque.
87. Watson, Cogito, 153.
88. Ibid., 147, 150.
89. Quoted by Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, xv, from Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 305.
90. G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande; the section on Descartes makes up the second half of the book, 357–689.
91. René Descartes to Pierre Chanut, 1 February 1647, in Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 78.
92. Leroy, Descartes: Philosophe au Masque; Dimitri Davidenko, Descartes le Scandalleux (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988). See also Anne Staquet, Descartes et le Libertinage (Paris: Hermann, 2009).
93. Pintard, Libertinage Érudit, 203–4.
94. See, for instance, Françoise Charles-Daubert, Les libertins érudits en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); Anthony McKenna and Pierre-François Moreau, eds., Libertinage et philosophie au XVIIe siècle: La résurgence des philosophies antiques (Saint-Étienne, France: L’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2003); Didier Foucault, Un Philosophe libertin dans l’Europe Baroque: Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585–1619) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003); Marcella Leopizzi, Les sources documentaires du courant libertine Français: Giulio Cesare Vanini (Fasano, Italy: Schena Editore; Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2004); Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, Dis/simulations: Jules-César Vanini, François La Mothe Le Vayer, Gabriel Naudé, Louis Machon et Torquato Accetto: Religion, morale et politique au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008).
95. Charles-Daubert, Les libertins érudits, 97.
96. Catherine Wilson, “Descartes and the Corporeal Mind: Some Implications of the Regius Affair,” in Descartes’ Natural Philosophy, ed. Stephen Gaukroper, John Schuster, and John Sutton (London: Routledge, 2000), and Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008); Åkerman, Queen Christina; Staquet, Descartes et le Libertinage; Alexandra Torero-Ibad, Libertinage, Science et Philosophie dans le matérialism de Cyrano de Bergerac (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009).
97. Russell Shorto, Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason (New York: Doubleday, 2008); Steven Nadler, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Tad M. Schmaltz, Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
98. A good place to see this at work is in Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). My thanks to Caroline Castiglione for the conversation that brought up the phrase “tangential evidence.”
1. D’Argenson, “Note sur la famille Descartes et l’origine de son name,” Mémoires de la Société archéologique de Touraine 4 (1847): 87–94.
2. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 590–91: on the left face of his tomb, “Renatus Des-Cartes, Perronij Dominus, &c. / Ex Antiquâ & Nobili inter Pictones & Armoricos Gente, / In Gallià natus . . .”; the funeral oration was by the Leiden historiographer Marcus Zuerius Boxhornius.
3. The family’s coat of arms was awarded following a determination of the family’s nobility in 1668: C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 13.
4. For a helpful family tree, see D. Clarke, Descartes: A Biography, x–xi.
5. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 586. He died after an illness of several days, in the home of the French ambassador, Chanut, who knew Descartes well, so this burial location was presumably in accordance with Descartes’s wishes.
6. D’Argenson, “Note sur la famille Descartes,” 87–88, 92, 95.
7. James Michael Hayden, France and the Estates General of 1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 87.
8. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 1–18; Watson, Cogito, 44; Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 2.
9. The negative result is from Dictionnaire de biographie Française (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1965), 10:1238–44; the ambassador was Emeric Gobier, Sieur de Barrault.
10. Pierre Mathurin de l’Écluse des Loges, Memoirs of Maximilian de Bethune, Duke of Sully, trans. Charlotte Lennox and Samuel Johnson, 6 vols. (London: J. Rivington et al. 1778), 4:25–34; Alexandre Petitot et al., Collection des memoires relatifs a l’histoire de France (Paris: Foucault, 1824), 44:467.
11. On April 10, 1618: C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 40.
12. The letters were dated December 10, 1625, which would refer back to Joachim’s forty years in office in the parlement (C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 11).
13. Hayden, France and Estates General, 79.
14. Leroy, Descartes: Philosophe au Masque, 47.
15. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 7–8. Descartes’s mixed but ultimately negative view of Machiavelli can be found in a letter to Princess Elizabeth immediately after she was ordered to her relatives in Brandenburg, September 1646 (Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:292–95).
16. For a fine study of Jesuit education and La Fleche, see Gaukroger, Descartes: Intellectual Biography, 38–61. Descartes studied there from about Easter 1606 probably until 1613 or 1614 (the evidence is unclear). Gaukroger (Descartes: Intellectual Biography, 38), and Watson (Cogito, 76) think that the 1614 date is more likely; Rodis-Lewis (Descartes: Life and Thought, 8) prefers September 1615.
17. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 20, 32–33.
18. C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 10:535.
19. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 21–22.
20. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 11, 13.
21. Ibid., 36–37.
22. Hayden, France and Estates General, 72, 79–80.
23. On the dispute in Poitiers, see Jeffrey K. Sawyer, Printed Poison: Pamphlet Propaganda, Faction Politics, and the Public Sphere in Early Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 73–83.
24. Hayden, France and Estates General, 280; D. Clarke, Descartes: A Biography, xi. Maître is a French form of address for senior lawyers.
25. Hayden, France and Estates General, 79, 283.
26. Arlette Jouanna, The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: The Mysteries of a Crime of State (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013), 233.
27. Hilary Gatti, Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe: From Machiavelli to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 117–33.
28. Hayden, France and Estates General, 131–4, 145.
29. John Cottingham, ed., Descartes’ Conversation with Burman, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 33.
30. For instance, C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 28; also see Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 56–62.
31. D’Argenson, “Note sur la famille Descartes,” 91.
32. For a description of the entombment of Henri’s heart, see Christian Regniér, “The Heart of the Kings of France: ‘Cordial Immortality,’” Medicographia, accessed April 17, 2017, http://www.medicographia.com/2010/07/the-heart-of-the-kings-of-france-cordial-immortality/; on Descartes’s burial and tomb, see C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 585–94.
33. For example, C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 69.
34. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 23.
35. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 69; G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 413; Watson, Cogito, 123; Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 61.
36. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:136. Baillet is not entirely clear about the date but says that it was about a year after Descartes’s return from Italy, which would place it in the spring or early summer of 1626.
37. Mémoires du Cardinal de Richelieu, tome sixième (1626) (Paris: Édouard Champion, 1925), 74–75.
38. Hayden, France and Estates General, 249.
39. Ibid., 159, 53.
40. Kleinman, Anne of Austria, 33; Carl Jacob Burckhardt, Richelieu and His Age, trans. Edwin Muir, Willa Muir, and Bernard Hoy, 3 vols. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), 1:150–57.
41. Jean-Marie Constant, Gaston d’Orleans: Prince de la Liberté (Paris: Perrin, 2013), 116: “‘maintien de la liberté du peuple, sans blesser l’autorité du prince.’” The oration was pronounced by Jean François Senault, who wrote on the passions and become head of the Oratorians in 1663.
42. Descartes quoted in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:384–5.
43. The story has often been told. I have mainly followed the versions in Batiffol, Duchesse de Chevreuse, 86–117, and Burckhardt, Richelieu and His Age, 192–207.
44. Mémoires du Cardinal de Richelieu, 6:74–75: Jean de Bourgneuf, sieur de Cucé, and Isaac Loisel de Bry were the premier and second presidents, respectively; Descartes served as doyen; Hay as sous-doyen, with the remaining councilors being Gilles de Lys, Laurent Peschart, Jean du Halgouët, de Martigné, Oudart, Huet, and François d’Andigné; the clerks were Pierre Malescot and Pierre de Verdun. François Foucquet, father of the celebrated surintendant, Charles de Machault, siegneur d’Arnouville, and Tanneguy de Launay acted for the prosecution.
45. Kleinman, Anne of Austria, 69–70.
46. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 11.
47. The award was given “in the camp before La Rochelle, 20 July 1628” (ibid., 11).
48. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:115.
49. On Descartes’s education, see esp. Gaukroger, Descartes: Intellectual Biography, 38–61.
50. C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 10:535.
51. “Son devoir joint à son inclination le portoit à vouloir prendre parti dans les troupes du roy: mais il fallut prendre quelques mesures pour ne point paroître partisan du maréchal D’Ancre” (“His duty and inclination together induced him to want to join with the king’s company: but it was necessary to take measures for not appearing to be a partisan of the maréchal D’Ancre,” i.e., Concini): Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:40.
52. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:35–39. He must here be thinking of the possibility that Descartes accompanied the court to Guyenne, since the proxy marriages both occurred on October 18, 1615, and all the parties met on November 9; the wedding in France was celebrated on November 25 in Bordeaux, and the return to Paris began at the end of November, taking four months. The court’s return passed through Poitiers, as well as Tours and Blois: Kleinman, Anne of Austria, 23–29.
53. Baillet, Life, 22.
54. The literature on Renaissance manners is extensive, much stimulated by Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols. (New York: Urizen, 1978–1982); for a fine recent introduction to the genre, see Snyder, Dissimulation. By Descartes’ lifetime “masking” had shifted from aesthetic to political purposes: Marc Bayard, “Double Persona: Le Masque, D’une esthéthique à une politique (XVIe–XVIIe Siècles),” in Masques Mascarades Mascarons, edited by Françoise Viatte, Dominique Cordellier, and Violaine Jeammet (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2014), 181–89.
55. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:367–69.
56. Jacques Thuillier and Jacques Foucart, Rubens’ Life of Marie De Medici (New York: Harry N. Abrams, [1970]), 27.
57. Kleinman, Anne of Austria, 31.
58. Kathleen Wellman, Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 245.
59. Bassompierre, Memoires du Mareschal de Bassompierre, contenant l’histoire de sa vie: Et de ce qui s’est fait de plus remarquable à la cour de France pendant quelques années (1665; Cologne: Jean Sambix, 1703), 78–79.
60. Trevor Aston, ed. Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660: Essays from Past and Present (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970); Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
61. Geoffrey Keynes, The Life of William Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 194.
62. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:36–37.
63. F. E. Sutcliffe, Guez de Balzac et son temps: Littérature et politique (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1959).
64. Ibid., 18, 23. The duc d’Épernon is usually seen as one of Marie de Medici’s closest allies. For his involvement in the Chalais plot, see Victor-L. Tapié, France in the Age of Louis XIII and Richelieu, trans. D. McN. Lockie (London: Macmillan, 1974), 161.
65. The phrase was made well-known by Pintard, Libertinage Érudite.
66. La Mothe Le Vayer married Mademoiselle de la Haye, daughter of the ambassador, i.e., the niece of Mydorge’s wife: David Durand, The Life of Lucilio (Alias Julius Caesar) Vanini, Burnt for Atheism at Thoulouse (London: Printed for W. Meadows at the Angel in Cornhill, 1730), 93. Mydorge died in 1647, when she was said to be about forty-two; La Mothe Le Vayer died in 1672.
67. Harth, Cartesian Women, 15–16.
68. On Gournay and Théophile, see Harth, Cartesian Women, 29; on Gournay and Balzac, see Marjorie Henry Ilsley, A Daughter of the Renaissance: Marie le Jars de Gournay, Her Life and Works (The Hague: Mouton, 1963), 134–35, 226; Gournay frequented the libertine circle around Marguerite de Valois: Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 135.
69. Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:119; C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 6:16; Montaigne’s essay on cannibals is well known; on Gournay’s interest in the emperors of China, see Broad and Green, History of Women’s Political Thought, 128.
70. Jason Lewis Saunders, Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955).
71. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 27; Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:347. For Descartes’s friend Balzac denouncing the immoral consequences of Stoic paradoxes, see Roger Zuber, ed., Oeuvres Diverses (1644) (Paris: Honoré Chamion Éditeur, 1995), 128.
72. Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 2011); Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); C. Wilson, Epicureanism; Snyder, Dissimulation.
73. Cremonini’s private motto was Intus ut libet, foris ut moris est (“In private think what you like, in public behave as is the custom”): John S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (London: Athlone, 1960), 9.
74. See especially C. Wilson, Epicureanism.
75. Pierre Bayle, A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, 10 vols. (London: James Bettenham et al., 1734–1741), 4:460–61.
76. Johann Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance: Johann Weyer, De Praestigiis Daemonum, trans. John Shea (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), 529–35.
77. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Willem Frijhoff, eds. Witchcraft in the Netherlands from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century (Rotterdam: Universtaire Pers, 1991).
78. Robin, Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 20–21.
79. Quotations from Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 2:15, 62, 61, 11.
80. The literature on witchcraft is enormous, but for a line about its associations with changes in legal procedure see, for example, Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1987).
81. Nicholas S. Davidson, “Lucretius, Atheism, and Irreligion in Renaissance and Early Modern Venice,” in Lucretius and the Early Modern, ed. David Norbrook, S. J. Harrison, and Philip R. Hardie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 67–79.
82. Leopizzi, Les sources documentaires, 732–33; for a more contemporary reading, see Durand, Life of Vanini; Foucault, Philosophe libertin; Cavaillé, Dis/simulations; Charles-Daubert, Libertins Érudits, 25–26; Georges Minois, The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 90–91.
83. Minois, Atheist’s Bible, 58, quoting the Jesuit Garasse.
84. Germana Ernst, Tommaso Campanella: The Book and the Body of Nature, trans. David L. Marshall (Dordrecht; New York: Springer, 2010), 34.
85. Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach and A. W. Fairbairn, “History and Structure of Our Traité des Trois Imposteurs,” in Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe: Studies on the Traité des Trois Imposteurs, ed. Silvia Berti, Françoise Charles-Daubert, and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer, 1996), 90–91; for the story of the “three impostors,” see Minois, Atheist’s Bible, and the essays in Berti, Charles-Daubert, and Popkin, Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought.
86. Anne Staquet, Descartes et le Libertinage, 11–17; Snyder, Dissimulation.
87. Pintard, Libertinage Érudit; Charles-Daubert, Libertins Érudits.
88. Peter Dear, Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 23–27.
89. Durand, Life of Vanini, 101.
90. For a summary of his life and work, see W. D. Howarth, Life and Letters in France: The 17th Century (New York: Charles Scbribner’s, 1965), 14–19.
91. Sutcliffe, Guez de Balzac, 27.
92. Balzac’s relationship with Théophile later cooled for an unknown reason: ibid., 22.
93. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 412, 416.
94. Batiffol, Duchesse de Chevreuse, 17.
95. René Descartes to Pierre Chanut, 1 February 1647, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:313, Descartes quotes Théophile on the power of love to destroy, as Paris’s desire did to Troy.
96. “Son devoir joint à son inclination le portoit à vouloir prendre parti dans les troupes du roy: mais il fallut prendre quelques mesures pour ne point paroître partisan du maréchal D’Ancre.”: Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:40.
97. Thuillier and Foucart, Rubens’ Life of Marie De Medici, 17.
98. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 131.
99. Kleinman, Anne of Austria, 20; Constant, Gaston d’Orleans, 45–46, 201–35.
100. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 590.
101. Shorto, Descartes’ Bones, 43–53, 65–70. It is perhaps similar to Galileo’s (middle) finger, now on exhibit in the Galileo museum in Florence.
102. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:39.
1. Among other studies, see William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook, eds., Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014).
2. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:40: “En quoi il se proposa l’éxemple de plusieurs juenes gentilshommes de la noblesse françoise, qui alloient alors apprendre le métier de la guerre sous le prince Maurits De Nassau en Hollande.”
3. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 22.
4. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:4–5.
5. Maurits’s brother had been raised by the Spaniards, brought up a Catholic, and married into the French nobility (Eleonora of Bourdon-Condé). He also inherited the barony of Breda, so that Philip William would have been its governor, not Maurits, if Descartes had gone there in 1617. Baillet was aware of these distinctions when he published the biography of Descartes in 1691 (Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:44–49), and he elaborated on them in a book on the Princes of Orange in 1692, which includes a section on Philip William (pp. 75–89) and well as Maurits (pp. 91–109): Adrien Baillet, Histoire des Princes d’Orange de la Maison de Nassau (Amsterdam: Paul Marret, 1692).
6. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 42–43.
7. François Monnier, Philippe de Béthune (1565–1649): Le conseiller d’estat, ou, recueil général de la politique moderne (Paris: Economica, 2012).
8. Isaac Beeckman, Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634, 4 vols., ed. Cornelis de Waard (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1939–53), 237: “Nitebatur heri, qui erat 10 Nov. 1618; Bredae Gallus Picto probare nullum esse angulum revera, hoc argumento: . . .”; and 257, entry for December 26, 1618.
9. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 42, accepts Borel’s attestation on this, as does Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 25. As far as I know, none of his other biographers have made anything of the fact that the coin was a doubloon. Borel calls it a “duplio,” referring to the Spanish doblón, meaning “double”: Borel, Renatus Descartes, 8.
10. René Descartes, Compendium of Music (Compendium Musicae), ed. Charles Kent, trans. Walter Robert (Münster, Germany: American Institute of Musicology, 1961), conclusion.
11. René Descartes to Servien, 12 May 1647, in C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, 5:25, cited by G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 374.
12. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:44–45.
13. Cottingham, Descartes’ Conversation, sec. 51, p. 32; for the sake of simplicity, I have substituted “Counter-Remonstrant” for his term, “Gomarist,” and “Remonstrant” for “Arminian.” After Descartes’s death, a note from the French embassy mentioned that he was Prédestiné: C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 586.
14. Frederick B. Artz, The Development of Technical Education in France, 1500–1850 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 42; Gaukroger, Descartes: Intellectual Biography, 59.
15. Henry Guerlac, “Science and War in the Old Regime: The Development of Science in an Armed Society” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1941), 63–85.
16. Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
17. Eric Lund, “The Generation of 1683: The Scientific Revolution and Generalship in the Habsburg Army, 1686–1723,” in Warfare in Eastern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Brian L. Davies (Boston: Brill, 2012), 199–248.
18. An excellent recent study is Marjolein ’t Hart, The Dutch Wars of Independence: Warfare and Commerce in the Netherlands 1570–1680 (London: Routledge, 2014).
19. For a fine general account, see James A. Bennett, “The Mechanical Arts,” in The Cambridge History of Science, ed. Katherine Park and Loraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 686–93.
20. See esp. Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1–23.
21. A compelling overview is Lauro Martines, Furies: War in Europe, 1450–1700 (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013); see also Christopher Duffy, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494–1660 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).
22. The words are from Buonaiuto Lorini, quoted in Alexander Marr, Between Raphael and Galileo: Mutio Oddi and the Mathematical Culture of Late Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 81.
23. Pamela O. Long, David McGee, and Alan M. Stahl, eds., The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2009).
24. Luigi Barbasetti, The Art of Foil, with a Short History of Fencing (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1932), 175–274; Evelyn Lincoln, Brilliant Discourse: Pictures and Readers in Early Modern Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 82–102. The most notable example of geometrical design for fencing is Girard Thibault, Academie de l’espée de Girard Thibault d’Anvers: Ou se demonstrent par reigles mathematiques sur le fondement d’un cercle mysterieux la theorie et pratique des vrais et iusqu’a present incognus secreta du maniement des armes, a pied et a cheval (Anvers [Antwerp]: 1628).
25. G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 373; the French engineers were Jacques Alleaume and David van Orliens.
26. Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, “Geometries of Space: Dutch Mathematics and the Visualization of Distance,” in Mapping Spaces: Networks of Knowledge in 17th Century Landscape Painting, ed. Ulrike Gehring and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe, Germany: Hirmer, 2014), 349.
27. Pieter Jan van Winter, Hoger beroepsonderwijs avant-la-lettre: Bemoeiingen met de vorming van landmeters en ingenieurs bij de Nederlandse Universiteiten van de 17e en 18e eeuw (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitg. Mij, 1988), 16–22.
28. E. J. Dijksterhuis, Simon Stevin (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1943); Dirk J. Struik, The Land of Stevin and Huygens: A Sketch of Science and Technology in the Dutch Republic during the Golden Century, Studies in the History of Modern Science, No. 7 (1958; Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981); Klaas van Berkel, “Part One: The Legacy of Stevin: A Chronological Narrative,” in A History of Science in the Netherlands: Survey, Themes, and Reference, ed. Klaas van Berkel, Albert van Helden, and Lodewijk Palm (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999).
29. Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution 1560–1660 (Belfast: M. Boyd, 1956); Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); ‘t Hart, Dutch Wars of Independence.
30. ‘t Hart, Dutch Wars of Independence, 37–80.
31. That he knew how to describe simple machines is clear from his little work of October 1637, sent as a letter to Huygens; Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:66–73.
32. My translation, based on Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:116–17, but restoring the literal meaning based on the 1637 edition, and italicizing two words.
33. An alternative reading would be to imagine he was thinking of the Ville de Richelieu, on which work began in 1631, but that was more a grand château than a town per se. By the time of the Discours he would have passed by Glückstadt.
34. My translation, based on Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:116–17, but restoring the literal meaning based on the 1637 edition, and italicizing one word.
35. Klaas van Berkel, Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion: Mechanical Philosophy in the Making (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 147.
36. Beeckman, Journal, 4:62, also quoted in Berkel, Isaac Beeckman, 26.
37. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:xiii–xiv. Van Schooten also edited Viète’s works in 1646. An English translation of the passage is given in Baillet, Life, 23–24. Lipstorp published an account of Descartes’s life as an appendix to his 1653 work on Descartes’s ideas: C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, v–vi. The work is summarized in Borel, Renatus Descartes, 65–107. Lipstorp had later taken up residence in Paris and become well acquainted with Baillet, giving him everything he had on Descartes (as well as a work on how to decode the scriptures to predict the future): Baillet, Jugemens des Savans, 19.
38. On mathematical tutors in the period, see James A. Bennett, “The Mechanics’ Philosophy and the Mechanical Philosophy,” History of Science 24 (1986): 1–28; Mario Biagioli, “The Social Status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450–1600,” History of Science 27 (1989): 41–95; Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, “Stevin, Huygens and the Dutch Republic: The Golden Age of Mathematics,” Nieuw archief voor wiskunde, 5th ser., 9 (2008): 100–107.
39. The mother of Benjamin de Rohan, baron de Soubise, an important Huguenot military leader who will figure in the subsequent account, and who had also studied war under Maurice of Nassau.
40. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 215. See also Wikipedia, s.v. “François Viète,” last modified April 7, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/François_Viète.
41. For instance, the Venetian Paolo Sarpi thought Viète was one of two original minds from his own century, the other being Humphrey Gilbert: Massimo Bucciantini, Michele Camerota, and Franco Giudice, Galileo’s Telescope: A European Story, trans. Catherine Bolton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 35.
42. J. P. Devos, Les Chiffres de Philippe II (1555–1598) et du despacho universal durant le XVIIe siècle (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1950), 59; David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (1967; New York: Scribner, 1996), 116–18; Peter Pesic, “Secrets, Symbols, and Systems: Parallels between Cryptanalysis and Algebra,” Isis 88 (1997): 674–92; Dejanirah Couto, “Spying in the Ottoman Empire: Sixteenth-Century Encrypted Correspondence,” in Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, vol. 3, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kristie Macrakis, “Confessing Secrets: Secret Communication and the Origins of Modern Science,” Intelligence and National Security 25 (2010): 183–97.
43. Berkel, Isaac Beeckman, 22.
44. On his departure and unspecified travels in the province of Holland, see ibid., 25.
45. Ibid., 29.
46. Ibid., 14–15: his first private teacher was a distant relative, Jan van den Broecke.
47. “Mr. Duperon Picto Renatus Descartes vocatur in ea Musica, quam mea causa jam describit”: Beeckman, Journal, 257.
48. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:4; Berkel, Isaac Beeckman, 25.
49. Berkel, Isaac Beeckman, 19.
50. H. H. Kubbinga, “Beeckmans ‘Molecuul’-Theorie als Nieuwe Categorie in de Geschiedenis van de Theorie van de Materie: Een Overzicht,” Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 81 (1989): 161–77.
51. An examination of Beeckman’s notebook shows that music probably constituted the bulk of his journal writing in the period, and that those sections are not so much summaries of others’ opinions (as with his medical notes) as they are investigations exploring his own ideas: Beeckman, Journal, vol. 1.
52. On music and natural philosophy, see H. F. Cohen, Quantifying Music: The Science of Music At the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580–1650 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984); D. P. Walker, Music, Spirit and Language in the Renaissance, ed. Penelope Gouk (London: Variorum Reprints, 1985); Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
53. Descartes, Compendium of Music.
54. Berkel, Isaac Beeckman, 25.
55. Schuster, Descartes-Agonistes, 112–28.
56. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:50–51: the work was called De l’Ame des Bêtes.
57. Descartes, Compendium of Music, conclusion.
58. C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 10:151–2; G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 381–82; the word pictura is often translated as “painting” (as in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:1), but I think in this context it implies three-dimensional perspective drawing.
59. Cottingham, Descartes’ Conversation, 47.
60. Mary J. Henninger-Voss, “How the ‘New Science’ of Cannons Shook Up the Aristotelian Cosmos,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2002): 371–97; Mary J. Henninger-Voss, “Comets and Cannonballs: Reading Technology in a Sixteenth-Century Library,” in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation, ed. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007).
61. Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Corvalis: Oregon State University Press, 2011), 106–7; Martines, Furies, 63–64.
62. Matteo Valleriani, Galileo Engineer (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010); see also Mario Biagioli, Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); J. L. Heilbron, Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
63. Sven Dupré, “Ausonio’s Mirrors and Galileo’s Lenses: The Telescope and Sixteenth-Century Practical Optical Knowledge,” Galilaeana 2 (2005): 145–80.
64. Bucciantini, Camerota, and Giudice, Galileo’s Telescope; for a recent account of the probable development of the telescope in the Dutch Republic, see Arjen Dijkstra, “Between Academics and Idiots: A Cultural History of Mathematics in the Dutch Province of Friesland (1600–1700)” (PhD diss., Twente University, 2012), 132–56.
65. Ofer Gal and Raz D. Chen-Morris, Baroque Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
66. See especially Marr, Between Raphael and Galileo; Ulrike Gehring and Peter Weibel, eds., Mapping Spaces: Networks of Knowledge in 17th Century Landscape Painting (Karlsruhe, Germany: Hirmer, 2014).
67. René Descartes to Isaac Beeckman, 26 March 1618, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:1–4; see also his disappointment in realizing that it was not so simple to make the devices he imagined (p. 4).
68. Dijksterhuis, “Geometries of Space”; the work referred to is Van Schooten’s Organica conicarum sectionum in plano descriptione (“Mechanical description of conic sections in a plane,” 1646).
69. H. J. M. Bos, ed., The Structure of Descartes’ Géometrie, Lectures in the History of Mathematics (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1993).
70. Dijksterhuis, “Geormetries of Space,” 115.
71. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:1–4.
72. The “Parnassus” notebook is inscribed “1 Jan 1619”: C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 29.
73. René Descartes to Isaac Beeckman, 24 January 1619, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:1.
74. The letter was sent from Breda to “Monsieur Isaac Beeckman Docteur en medicine” at his parents’ house on the Beestenmarkt in Middleburg (C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 10:160).
75. Berkel, Isaac Beeckman, 26.
76. René Descartes to Isaac Beeckman, 23 April 1618, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:3.
77. René Descartes to Isaac Beeckman, 29 April 1618, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:4.
78. Isaac Beeckman to René Descartes, 6 May 1618, in C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 10:167–69.
79. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:53.
80. Leroy, Descartes: Philosophe au Masque, 155–56. What little is known of Villebressieu is published in C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 1:214–15, 218. He may have been a member of the noble family of Bressieux associated with the dukes of Burgundy, whose castle was destroyed in 1612.
81. Opening sentence of part 2 of Discours.
82. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:54.
83. Antoine Adam, Théophile de Viau et la libre pensée Française en 1620 (1935; repr., Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1965), 433.
84. On Postel, see William J. Bouwsma, Concordia Mundi: The Career and Thought of Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); Susanna Åkerman, Rose Cross over the Baltic: The Spread of Rosicrucianism in Northern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 173–95; Jean Bodin, Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime: Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis, trans. Marion Leathers Daniels Kuntz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
85. Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work, and Influence (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 7, 12–13.
86. Benoist Pierre, Le Père Joseph: L’Eminence Grise de Richelieu (Paris: Perrin, 2007), 225.
87. Jonathan Spangler, The Society of Princes: The Lorraine-Guise and the Conservation of Power and Wealth in Seventeenth-Century France (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 199, 201.
88. Susanna Åkerman, “Queen Christina of Sweden and Messianic Thought,” in Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews, ed. David S. Katz and Jonathan I. Israel (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 155–60; Åkerman, Queen Christina, 11–13, 230–33.
89. Åkerman, Queen Christina, 13, 55.
90. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:55.
91. Monnier, Philippe de Béthune, 43–46.
92. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:81.
93. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:55–58.
94. Ibid.
95. “It se mit donc dans les troupes bavaroises comme simple volontaire sans voulour prendre d’employ.” Ibid., 58.
96. Burckhardt, Richelieu and His Age, 171.
97. Spangler, Society of Princes. For instance, Charles III, Duke of Lorraine, married Claude de Valois, daughter of Henri and Catherine de Medici, in 1559; his son, Henry II “the good,” who had first married the sister of Henri IV, remarried in 1606 to Margherita Gonzaga, Marie de Medici’s niece; their granddaughter, Margaret, in turn secretly married Gaston d’Orleans in 1632. While Lorraine would be occupied by France under Richelieu, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 forced France’s withdrawal.
98. Cole, Olympian Dreams. The date is consistent with that in Descartes’s surviving notebook, the “Cogitationes Privatae,” in C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 10:216. The vivid and detailed description of the dreams might have been a draft of a book. Although they have long been taken as “real,” they are revealing even if read metaphorically.
99. Quoted in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:116.
100. I follow the translation in ibid., 32–40.
101. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:117–25. His informal moral rules (rather than absolute ones) were entirely in keeping with contemporary aristocratic norms: Emma Gilby, “Descartes’s ‘Morale Par Provision’: A Re-Evaluation,” French Studies 65 (2011): 444–58.
102. Cole, Olympian Dreams, 32–40.
103. Robert Halleux, “Helmontiana II: Le Prologue de l’Eisagoge, la Conversion de Van Helmont au Paracelsisme et les Songes de Descartes,” Mededelingen van de koninklijke academie voor wetenschappen, letteren en schone kunten van België, Klasse der Wetenschappen 49, no. 2 (1987): 32–33.
104. Ibid.
105. Frédéric de Buzon, “Un exemplaire de la Sagesse de Pierre Charron offert à Descartes en 1619,” Archives de Philosophie 55, no. 20 (1992): 1–3, with the Latin original: “Doctissimo Amico grato et minori fratri Renato Cartesio, d.d. ded., P. Johannes B. Molitor S.J., exeunte Anno 1619, JBM.”
106. Tullio Gregory, “Pierre Charron’s ‘Scandalous Book’,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
107. On Descartes’s debt to Charron, see especially José R. Maia Neto, Academic Skepticism in Seventeenth-Century French Philosophy: The Charronian Legacy 1601–1662 (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), 97–125.
108. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:86.
109. I follow the translation in Cole, Olympian Dreams, 32–40.
110. For further details on many of the events that follow, as well as an excellent contextualization of German intellectual debates during Descartes’s period in Germany, see Édouard Mehl, Descartes en Allemagne 1619–1620: Le contexte Allemand de l’élaboration de la science Cartésienne (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2001).
111. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 36.
112. Buzon, “Exemplaire.”
113. Quoted in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:125.
114. Mehl (Descartes en Allemagne, 189) thinks it is probable.
115. Raz Chen-Morris, Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016).
116. Schuster, Descartes Agonistes, 153–63.
117. Ulinka Rublack, The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for His Mother (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
118. For a recent account, see Robert S. Westman, The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 492–94.
119. Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).
120. Mehl (Descartes en Allemagne, 190) thinks that Kepler was a kind of absent father for Descartes in sorting out the Komentenstreit of 1619.
121. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:68–69; translation of the section on Faulhaber in Watson, Cogito, 104–6; but Rodis-Lewis (Descartes: Life and Thought, 53) says that Rothen had died in 1617.
122. For a recent review of the details, see Joly, Descartes et la chimie, 52–58.
123. William R. Shea, “Descartes and the Rosicrucians,” Annali Dell’Instituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze 4 (1979): 34. Åkerman says that he published the book at Ulm and dedicated it to “Polybius Cosmopolita”: Åkerman, Rose Cross, 221–22.
124. C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 10:214; for an example of the argument that is was a satire, see Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 35.
125. Balzac to Descartes, March 30, 1628; on interpretations of the dreams, see Leroy, Descartes: Philosophe au Masque, 79–88, and Freud’s interpretation at 89–90; Cole, Olympian Dreams; Alan Gabbey, “The Melon and the Dictionary: Reflections on Descartes’s Dreams,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 651–68.
126. The Algemeine und General Reformation der gantzen weiten Welt (Universal and General Reformation of the Whole Wide World) and the Fama Fraternitatis (Echoes of the Fraternity); see also Didier Kahn, “The Rosicrucian Hoax in France (1623–24),” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 238.
127. Montgomery, Cross and Crucible, 165–68.
128. Govert Snoek, De Rosenkruisers in Nederland: Voornamelijk in de eerste helft van de 17e eeuw, een inventarisatie (Haarlem, Netherlands: Rozekruis Pers, 2006), 19–56.
129. The best recent case for the political importance of the Rosicrucian manifestos has been made by Åkerman, who in her Rose Cross has revised the views of Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).
130. This is the main argument of Montgomery, Cross and Crucible, vol. 1; for a careful general review of the Rosicrucian movement, see Donald R. Dickson, The Tessera of Antila: Utopian Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 18–88.
131. On chymical theory, see Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540/2–1602) (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004); Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Lawrence M. Principe, ed., Chymists and Chymisry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry (Sagamore Beach, MA: Chemical Heritage Foundation and Science History Publications, 2007). On Paracelsus, see Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (New York: S. Karger, 1958); Charles Webster, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). On Germany, see Mehl, Descartes en Allemagne; Tara E. Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Alisha Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
132. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Under the Mantle of Love: The Mystical Eroticisms of Marsillio Ficino and Giordano Bruno,” in Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, ed. Jeffrey John Kripal and Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 175–207.
133. Montgomery, Cross and Crucible, 39–66; Dickson, Tessera of Antila, 22–30.
134. Snoek, De Rosenkruisers in Nederland, 57.
135. Gérard Simon, Kepler: Astronome Astrologue (Paris: Gallimard, 1979); Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 112.
136. Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). As Didier Kahn notes, the beginning of the seventeenth century represents a high-water mark for interest in Lull: Kahn, “Rosicrucian Hoax,” 251. Also see Tomás y Artau Carreras and Joaquín y Artau Carreras, Historia de la Filosofía Española: Filosopfía Cristiana de los Siglos XIII al XV, 2 vols. (Madrid: Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales, 1939–43), 118–57.
137. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 29, note D.
138. Adam (ibid., 48) notes that Baillet translated the phrase as “Rien du tout” (nothing at all) when it should be “rien de certain” (nothing certain), which leaves the door open to Descartes’s own view of the brethren. On the “Studium Bonae Mentis,” see C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 10:191–204.
139. Mehl (Descartes en Allemagne, 193) thinks that a reference in Faulhaber’s 1622 Miracula Arithmetica to his good friend, the noble (Herr) “Carolus Zolindius (Polybius),” is likely to be a reference to Descartes.
140. Shea, “Descartes and Rosicrucian Enlightenment.”
141. Borel, Renatus Descartes, 67.
1. Quoted in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:115.
2. Tapie, France in Age of Louis XIII, 112.
3. “. . . dont quelques uns pourroient etre de sa connoissance”: Baillet, Des-Cartes,1:64.
4. Monnier, Philippe de Béthune, 49.
5. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:66.
6. Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 299.
7. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:66–67.
8. Ibid., 70.
9. Martines, Furies.
10. P. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 299–308; Tapie, France in Age of Louis XIII, 113.
11. Germaine Lebel, La France et les principautés Danubiennes (du XVIe siècle à la chute de Napoléon 1er) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), 33–36.
12. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:73–75, 91.
13. Ibid., 1:70–73; Borel, Renatus Descartes, 8–9.
14. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:95; P. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 323.
15. Quoted in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:82.
16. P. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 324.
17. Quoted in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:403–4.
18. In Discours, quoted in ibid., 1:145.
19. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:95–97; quotation at 97.
20. The Poles had sent forces to help defeat the Bohemians, and the Turks had in turn entered in support of Bethlen; in 1621 the Ottoman Porte sent a powerful army against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that hoped to take the Ukraine and even reach the Baltic. But between the beginning of September and the beginning of October—in a conflict referred to as the battle of Khotyn or Chochim or Hotin—the commonwealth held off the Turks, leading to a treaty.
21. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:98–99.
22. E. Ladewig Petersen, in The Thirty Years’ War, by Geoffrey Parker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 72–73.
23. A branch of the family then ruling Pomerania descended from Anna of Lorraine, whose close relatives included the Prince of Orange and the Bourbons and Gonzagas.
24. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 102–3.
25. Ibid.
26. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 332.
27. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 62.
28. Edgar de Lanouvelle, Gabrielle d’Estrées et les Bourbon-Vendôme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1936), 103.
29. Sutcliffe, Guez de Balzac, 23–27. The delegation included Richelieu and father Bérulle for the queen and the Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld and Philippe de Béthune for the king: Monnier, Philippe de Béthune, 47.
30. Sutcliffe, Guez de Balzac, 27.
31. Taipe, France in Age of Louis XIII, 124–25.
32. Baillet (Des-Cartes, 1:106) describes his properties as a fief named “le perron”—from which he took his title—a great house in Poitiers, and a market next to the house (“le marchais outré une maison”), as well as several farms (“arpens de terre labourable”) near Availle (which is just outside of Châtellerrault).
33. Ibid., 1:106.
34. One antiquarian notes that “In 1623 the epidemic fevers in Europe became more fatal, as the period of pestilence [the summer] approached. Riverius, who has written on the epidemic fevers of this period in the south of France, observes that the mortality was great. . . . He refers to the city of Montpelier, where almost half died who were seized”: Noah Webster, A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases, 2 vols. (1799; New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 1:180. Didier Kahn (“Rosicrucian Hoax,” 298–99) has found evidence that the plague was troublesome in Paris at the end of the summer. Colin Jones notes that the decade from 1625 to 1635 saw the largest number of plague tracts published in France, correlating with the worst period of the disease: Colin Jones, “Plague and Its Metaphors in Early Modern France,” Representations 53 (1996): 103.
35. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:106: “l’on goûtoit le repos.” On the date of the return of the court to Paris (January 10), see Kleinman, Anne of Austria, 60.
36. Although young (b. 1604), Claude Hardy was already accomplished and became a conseiller in the Châtelet de Paris; it is said that in 1623 Descartes resided in the house of Claude’s father, Sébastien Hardy: Joseph-François Michaud et Louis-Gabriel Michaud, Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, vol. 18 (Paris: Louis Vivés, 1857), 457.
37. Baillet, Life of Descartes, 54; the French is at Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:118.
38. Baillet, Life of Descartes, 50; the French is at Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:112.
39. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 115–16.
40. Schuster, Descartes-Agonistes, 164.
41. Didier Kahn, “Rosicrucian Hoax,” 252.
42. Ibid., 264–68.
43. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 106–10.
44. Didier Kahn, “Rosicrucian Hoax,” 244.
45. Howarth, Life and Letters, 18–19.
46. Jeffrey John Kripal and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, eds., Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
47. Montgomery, Cross and Crucible, 165. Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso (News-sheet from Parnassus, 1612) mocks contemporary justice by having Apollo hear complaints about worldly decisions and hand down proper sentences instead. On the associations between philosophical libertinism and political reform in the Venice of the time, see Wilding, Galileo’s Idol.
48. Didier Kahn, “Rosicrucian Hoax,” 263, 268–75, 294.
49. New Catholic Encyclopedia., s.v. “Duvergier de Hauranne,” accessed May 15, 2017, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05218a.htm.
50. Didier Kahn, “Rosicrucian Hoax,” 239–240; Snoek, De Rosenkruisers in Nederland, 19.
51. Didier Kahn, “Rosicrucian Hoax,” 263, 268–75, 294.
52. Hayden, France and Estates General, 280.
53. John A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610–1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 109.
54. Douglas Clark Baxter, Servants of the Sword: French Intendants of the Army, 1630–70 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 4, 8, 12–14, 21, 78–79.
55. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:118.
56. P. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 381–84.
57. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:119.
58. See note 13 to part 1.
59. A. Cappelli, Cronologia, Cronografia e Calendario Perpetuo (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1969).
60. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 120–21.
61. Anna Frank-van Westrienen, De Groote Tour: Tekening van de Educatiereis der Nederlanders in de Zeventiende Eeuw (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1983); Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (London: Frank Cass, 1998).
62. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 64; Gaukroger, Descartes: Intellectual Biography, 133; Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 59–61; Ariew et al., Historical Dictionary of Descartes, 4.
63. Wikipedia, s.v. “Liste des chevaliers de l’ordre du Saint-Esprit,” last modified April 24, 2017, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_chevaliers_de_l%27ordre_du_Saint-Esprit.
64. Monnier, Philippe de Béthune, 47–53.
65. Pierre, Le Père Joseph, 225.
66. Nancy Siraisi, Lucia Dacome, and Heikki Mikkeli have drawn our attention to Santorio in recent years, and there is currently an ongoing project to study his quantifying methods at the University of Exeter.
67. Ernst, Campanella, esp. 27, 220.
68. On the details of the printing and reception of The Assayer, see Redondi, Galileo Heretic, 36–51; Heilbron, Galileo, 263–65.
69. Stillman Drake, ed., Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), 217–80. For a recent account of the book, see Heilbron, Galileo, 245–52.
70. Heilbron, Galileo, 266.
71. Francesco Barberini would become a Grand Inquisitor of the Roman Inquisition but did not vote against Galileo. On Guevara, see Annibale Fantoli, The Case of Galileo: A Closed Question? trans. George V. Coyne (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 141.
72. Borel, Renatus Descartes, 9.
73. See the letters to Mersenne, from the end of November 1633 to August 1634, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:40–45.
74. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:124. Descartes’s statement included: “Aussi ne vois-je rein dans ses livres qui me fasse envie, ni presque rien que je voulusse avoüer pour mien.”
75. An even earlier version of the idea had been developed by Robert Grosseteste in the thirteenth century.
76. Baillet, Des-Cartes, c. 1:122: “M Descartes crut qu’ il étoit bienséant à un gentihomme François d’ aller render des civilitez à un cardinal neveu, destine pour faire dans on pays une fonction aussi importante qu’ étoit cette legation.”
77. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 383.
78. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:127.
79. Ibid., 129; C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 69.
1. For a rich and penetrating account of these developments, see Schuster, Descartes-Agonistes, 167–348.
2. On Villebressieu and Mersenne, see C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 90–91; on Mersenne more generally, see Dear, Mersenne.
3. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:152.
4. Ibid., 1:132: “il étoit néantmoins trés-éloigné du libertinage.”
5. Tapie, France in Age of Louis XIII, 172–73.
6. Gaukroger, Descartes: Intellectual Biography, 136.
7. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:140–41: Cardinal Barberini remained in Paris until September 1625.
8. Ibid., 1:134; Baillet, Life, 60–61.
9. Baillet, Life, 57.
10. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:136: the address is given as the rue Du Four Aux Trois Chappelets. Jouanna, St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 126.
11. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:153–54.
12. Harth, Cartesian Women, 26.
13. Constant, Gaston d’Orleans, 72–73.
14. For the case that Marie Le Jars de Gournay deserves the credit, see Ilsley, Daughter of the Renaissance, 230–31.
15. Harth, Cartesian Women, 26; C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 12:236. After the death of the duchesse du Montpensier, her uncle, Richelieu, intended Madame de Comballet to be married to Gaston d’Orléans: it never happened.
16. Constant, Gaston d’Orleans, 117.
17. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:144–45.
18. Ibid., 1:143: “Ce fut M Des Argues qui contribua principalement à le faire connoître au Cardinal de Richelieu: et quoi que M Descartes ne prétendît tirer aucun avantage de cette connoissance, il ne laissa pas de se reconnoître trés-obligé au zéle que M Des Argues faisoit paroître pour le servir.”
19. Pierre Gatulle, Gaston d’Orléans: Entre mécénat et impatience du pouvoir (Seyssel, France: Champ Vallon, 2012), 98, 383, 377.
20. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:147; also see Pintard, Libertinage Érudit, 203–4.
21. Ilsley, Daughter of the Renaissance, 144.
22. Constant, Gaston d’Orleans, 15, 115, 202.
23. Sylvain Matton, “Cartésianisme et alchimie: à propos d’un témoignage ignoré sur les travaux alchimiques de Descartes. Avec une note sur Descartes et Gómez Pereira,” in Aspects de la tradition alchimique au XVIIe Siècle (Paris: Société d’Étude de l’Histoire de l’Alchimie, Archè, 1998), 53–54; also see Constant, Gaston d’Orleans, 202.
24. Frances Huemer, Rubens and the Roman Circle: Studies of the First Decade (New York: Garland, 1996), 87–91.
25. Father Bérulle would later be made cardinal.
26. For the biographical details of Bérulle’s career, I follow Pierre, Monarchie ecclésiale, 346–49; on his work with the Carmelites, also see Jean Dagens, Bérulle et les origines de la restauration Catholique (1575–1611) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1952), 191–228.
27. Roger Ariew, “Oratorians and the Teaching of Cartesian Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century France,” History of Universities 17 (2001–2): 47–80.
28. Gatulle, Gaston d’Orléans, 257–58.
29. For the report of his dressing in green taffeta, which comes from Le Vasseur, see C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 74; on Anne of Austria’s people, see Kleinman, Anne of Austria, 20; on Gaston as a “vert-galant,” see Constant, Gaston d’Orleans, pp. 201–35.
30. Alexander Marr, “Crowned with Harmless Fire: A New Look at Descartes,” Times Literary Supplement, March 13, 2015.
31. Jacques Thuillier, Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, and Denis Lavalle, Vouet: Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 6 Novembre 1990–11 Février 1991 (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990), 16.
32. Ibid., 100–108 for his major period in Rome (1622–27); Marr, “Crowned with Harmless Fire.”
33. Gatulle, Gaston d’Orléans, 172.
34. “Il y aura plaisir à lire vos diverses aventures dans la moyenne et dans la plus haute region de l’air, à considerer vos prouesses contre les Geans de l’Escole, le chemin que vous avez tenu, le progrez que vous avez fait dans le vérité des choses, etc.” Jean Louis Guez de Balzac to René Descartes, 30 March 1628, Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-Century Dutch Republic, accessed April 26, 2017, http://ckcc.huygens.knaw.nl/epistolarium/letter.html?id=desc004/1013.
35. For the association with Rosicrucianism, see G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 417, and Leroy, Descartes: Philosophe au Masque, 72–73; also see Didier Kahn, Alchimie et Paracelsisme en France a la fin de la Renaissance (1567–1625) (Geneva: Droz, 2007), 510 and Joly, Descartes et la Chimie, 61.
36. C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 1:212–18; Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:32–33.
37. On La Rochelle, see Borel, Renatus Descartes, 9; Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:155–60; on a sample of doubts, see C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 99; Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, xii; Watson, Cogito, 140.
38. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 99.
39. Pierre Grillon, ed., Les papiers de Richelieu: Section politique intérieure correspondence et papiers d’état, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Pedone, 1977), 2:627, item 755: “Rolle des cap[itai]nes de l’equipage du Sr de la Richardière pour l’embarquement du secours de la citadelle de Saint-Martin de Ré.” November 8, 1627: “Le capne Odart, admiral commandant le secours. Le capne Descart, visadmiral. . . .” Seventeen names are mentioned, with an eighteenth dismissed. A Protestant Sieur de la Richardiere can be found associated with Poitiers: “Histoires Singulaires,” Overblog (blog), accessed April 26, 2017, http://histoiressingulieres.over-blog.com/pages/Quelques_filiations_protestantes_poitevines_3-6154880.html; and “Ingrand,” Noms du Poitou (de la Pissarderie) (blog), June 22, 2013, http://nomsdupoitoudelapissarderie.blogspot.com/2013_06_01_archive.html.
40. Dutch naval support was required by the Treaty of Compiegne of June 1624, by which France subsidized the war against Spain in the low countries in return for naval support; the English were at that time allies of France, confirmed by the marriage treaty.
41. Gatulle, Gaston d’Orléans, 401.
42. Martines, Furies, 146–50.
43. I imagine that the note of November 8 is taken down at the end of the action on the Isle de Ré. It is possible, however, that it simply indicates a resupply of troops following the conclusion of events on the island.
44. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:158–59.
45. Ibid., 1:157: “il se procura encore le plaisir de s’ en entretenir avec les ingénieurs.”
46. G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 430–32.
47. Baillet devotes an entire chapter to La Rochelle: Baillet, Des-Cartes, 2:155–60. Beeckman noted that after Descartes’s October visit to him, Descartes promised to send him a copy of his geometry from Paris: Watson, Cogito, 141.
48. Ariew et al., Historical Dictionary of Descartes, quotations from p. 4.
49. Borel, Renatus Descartes, 9–11; Baillet, Des-Cartes, 2:160–66. On the documentation for the episode, which stems from Borel and Clerselier, see Watson, Cogito, 142–43.
50. C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 1:212–18; Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:32–33.
51. There is a technical issue with “right reason,” which implies that all knowledge comes from the logos; like the Epicureans and others, Descartes considered the sources of knowledge of real things to lie in sense impressions rather than the logos. For an introduction to the issue, see Robert Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
52. C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 1:212–18; Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:32–33.
53. While most commentators agree with Baillet, Henri Gouhier places the meeting between the autumn of 1627 and April or May 1628: Sylvain Matton, ed., Lettres sur l’or potable, suives du traité de la connaissance des vrais principes de la nature et des mélanges, et de fragments d’un commentaire sur L’amphitéâtre de la Sapience Éternalle de Khunrath (Paris: Société d’Étude de l’Histoire de l’Alchimie, Archè, 2012), 50.
54. Georg Lutz, Kardinal Giovanni Francesco Guidi di Bagno: Politik und Religion im Zeitalter Richelieus und Urbans VIII (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971), 547.
55. Matton, “Cartésianisme et Alchimie,” 45; Monnier, Philippe de Béthune, 53.
56. Matton, Lettres sur l’or potable, 54.
57. Dedications of Jean Collesson (L’idee parfaicte de la philosophie hermetique, 1631) and Pierre Jean Fabre (L’abrégé des secrets chymiques, 1636); see Gatulle, Gaston d’Orléons, 257.
58. Jack A. Clarke, Gabriel Naudé, 1600–1653 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1970), 42; see also Cavaillé, Dis/simulations.
59. Gideon Manning, “Descartes and the Bologna Affair,” British Journal for the History of Science 46, (2013): 1–13.
60. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:254; he also wrote of Descartes (1:253): “Il espéroit même que si opinions étoient jamais reçûës, toutes les controversies qui s’ agitent dans la théologie pourroient tomber d’ ells-mêmes, parce qu’ ells sont fondées pour la plûpart sur des principes de philosophie qu’ il estimoit faux” (“He even hoped that if his opinions were ever accepted, all the controversies which agitated theology might fall of themselves, because they were founded for the most part on principles of philosophy which he considered false”).
61. Constant, Gaston d’Orleans, 15, 115.
62. Chandoux was not a significant enough figure to draw any notice from Didier Kahn, Alchimie.
63. Commenting on Baillet’s sources, see C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 95.
64. Matton, “Cartésianisme et alchimie”; my great thanks to Dan Garber for alerting me to this reference.
65. Ibid., 16–21.
66. Ibid., 50–54.
67. Tapie, France in Age of Louis XIII, 172.
68. Rio Howard, “Guy de la Brosse: Botanique et chemie au début de la Révolution Scientifique,” Revue Histoire de Science 31 (1978): 301–26; Rio Howard, “Medical Politics and the Founding of the Jardin Des Plantes in Paris,” Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 9 (1980): 395–402; Rio Howard, “Guy de la Brosse and the Jardin des Plantes in Paris,” in The Analytic Spirit, ed. Harry Woolf (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 195–224.
69. Howard Solomon, Public Welfare, Science and Propaganda in Seventeenth Century France: The Innovations of Théophraste Renaudot (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), esp. 14, 19, 20, 39–40; for the conferences, see Kathleen Wellman, Making Science Social: The Conferences of Théophraste Renaudot 1633–1642 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).
70. Matton, “Cartésianisme et alchimie,” 57–135.
71. Joly, Descartes et la Chimie.
72. Schuster, Descartes-Agonistes, quotation at 301, Schuster’s analysis at 307–48, esp. 346–47.
73. Quotations in C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 4:62, 78; Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:143, 151; René Descartes to Marin Mersenne, 27 February 1637, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:53. More generally, see Theo Verbeek, “Les passions et la fièvre: L’idée de la maladie chez Descartes et quelques Cartésiens Néerlandais,” Tractrix 1 (1989): 45–61; Steven Shapin, “Descartes the Doctor: Rationalism and its Therapies,” British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000): 131–54.
74. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:165: “pria M Descartes qu’ il pût l’ entendre encore une autre fois sur le même sujet en particulier.”
75. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:165–66.
76. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 96.
77. The suggestion is at ibid., 94.
78. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:165–66: “L’ impression . . . se trouvent jointe à ce que son naturel et sa raison luy dictoient depuis long têms acheva de le déterminer. Jusques là il n’ avoit encore embrassé aucun parti dans la philosophie, et n’ avoit point pris de secte, comme nous l’ apprenons de luy meme.”
79. Ibid., 1:166: “Il se confirma dans la resolution de conserver sa liberté, et de travailler sur la nature même sans s’arrêter à voir en quoi il s’ approcheroit ou s’ éloigneroit de ceux qui avoient traitté la philosophie avant lui.”
80. Ibid.: “la chaleur du climat et la foule du grand monde.”
81. Quotations from ibid.; on Picot, 168.
82. Balzac to Descartes, 30 March 1628 (see note 34 above).
83. One alternative, stressing the climate, is well presented by C. Adam (Vie et Oeuvres, 98): “Il était prêt même à écrire sa physique, et n’aura besoin pour cela que de deux ou trois années. Seulement il prot la résolution de quitter Paris et la France: il lui fallait la tranquillité d’une retraite à l campagne, sous un climat favorable. Il pensa ne trouver ce qu’il désirait, qu’à l’étranger, dans un pays qu’il connaissait déjà: l’Italie ne lui convenant pas, à cause du climat, il choisit de préférence la Holland” (“He was even ready to write his physics, and would need only two or three years. But he had come to a resolution of leaving Paris and France: he needed the tranquility of a retreat in the country, in a favorable climate. He thought he could only find what he desired abroad, in a country he already knew: Italy was not suitable to him because of the climate, so he chose Holland”). Another alternative, stressing the need for solitude, is Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 49: “at the end of 1628, he escaped once more into a solitude so perfect that his location has remained forever unknown.”
84. Sawyer, Printed Poison, 141–42.
85. Quoted in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:396: “Passions,” under the heading “self-satisfaction.”
86. Tapié, France in Age of Louis XIII, 203.
87. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 1:177–78.
88. Ibid., 193–94.
89. Thomas M. Carr, “Descartes and Guez De Balzac: Humanist Eloquence Spurned,” in Descartes and the Resilience of Rhetoric: Varieties of Cartesian Rhetorical Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990). Also see Gournay’s quarrel with Balzac over his Lettres, in Michèle Fogel, Marie de Gournay: Itinéraires d’une femme savante (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 238–40.
90. Howarth, Life and Letters, 19, 29.
91. Sutcliffe, Guez de Balzac, 30–31.
92. G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 417.
93. René Descartes, “Clarissimo Viro Domino: Censura quarundum Epistolarum Domini Balzacii,” Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-Century Dutch Republic, accessed April 27, 2017, http://ckcc.huygens.knaw.nl/epistolarium/letter.html?id=desc004/1012.
94. Most studies of Descartes either ignore the episode or take it as merely a literary dispute, as in Carr, “Descartes and Guez De Balzac,” or Gaukroger, Descartes: Intellectual Biography, 181–82. Balzac’s biographers take it more seriously.
95. For this period of Balzac’s life, see Sutcliffe, Guez de Balzac, 30–32.
96. Lanouvelle, Gabrielle d’Estrées, 102–10. César was connected to the house of Lorraine by marriage to Françoise de Lorraine. After fleeing to Holland, he went on to England and did not return to France until the death of Richelieu; in 1643, he took part in the plot of the cabale des importants, one of whose leaders was Marie de Rohan.
97. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 77, and 241n12: he made a move to recover the trunk only in 1634.
98. René Descartes to Marin Mersenne, 15 April 1630, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:21, 23.
99. Opening of part 6, in C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 6:60; Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:141. We should imagine that he wrote these words while finishing his book, the contract for which was signed in 1636, for he elsewhere mentions the condemnation of Galileo as having occurred three years earlier (it took place in June 1633). The year 1628 is also consistent with his comment about how he had had his initial ambition nine years earlier still, i.e., 1619, which is when surviving notes about his workbook record that he had his famous set of three dreams leading to his resolution to search for the foundation of true knowledge.
100. René Descartes to Guez de Balzac, 15 April 1631, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:30.
101. End of part 3 of the Discours, in C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres De Descartes, 6:30–31; Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:126.
102. Descartes to Balzac, 15 April 1631.
103. Guez de Balzac, Oeuvres, ed. L. Moreau, 2 vols. (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre et Cie, 1854), 1:81; J. H. Elliott, Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 159.
104. Descartes to Balzac, 15 April 1631.
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid.
107. Sutcliffe, Guez de Balzac, 34–39.
108. “Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac: Biographie,” Académie française, accessed April 27, 2017, http://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-immortels/jean-louis-guez-de-balzac?fauteuil=28&election=13-03-1634.
109. René Descartes to Guez de Balzac, 5 May 1631, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:31–32.
110. Ibid.
1. Quoted in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 1:143.
2. Baillet, Des-Cartes, 2:67, 326; Ariew et al., Dictionary, 51.
3. Ferdinand Sassen, “De Reis van Pierre Gassendi in de Nederlanden (1628–1629),” in Mededelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Amsterdam: N. V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1960), 263–307; Ferdinand Sassen, “De Reis van Marin Mersenne in de Nederlanden (1630),” in Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Klasse der Letteren 16, no. 4 (1964).
4. Descartes to Mersenne, 15 April 1630, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:21.
5. Manning, “Descartes and Bologna Affair,” 10; the business was reported aloud to the Bolognese senate on March 1633, with Torelli’s initial effort occurring in late September 1632.
6. Tapié, France in Age of Louis XIII, 306–7.
7. The excitement of the moment is beautifully invoked in Redondi, Galileo Heretic.
8. C. Adam, Vie et Oeuvres, 587.
9. Bredius, Johannes Torrentius Schilder, 14–65; Snoek, De Rosenkruisers in Nederland, 105–68; see also Mike Dash, Batavia’s Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History’s Bloodiest Mutiny (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002), 35–43, 239–51.
10. On Beeckman’s student, see Berkel, Isaac Beeckman, 111; on the association of Van Hogelande and Torrentius with Thibault’s academy, see Dash, Batavia’s Graveyard, 34.
11. Bredius, Johannes Torrentius Schilder, 9.
12. C. Wilson, “Descartes and Corporeal Mind.”.
13. Quoted in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:317; Cottingham, Descartes’ Conversation, 47, 33.
14. Snoek, De Rosenkruisers in Nederland, 153. See Verbeek, La Querelle d’Utrecht; Theo Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy, 1637–1650 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992).
15. Verbeek, Descartes and Dutch, 57.
16. G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 636.
17. Ibid., 636–67; from Baillet, Des-Cartes, 2:327: “de ses grandes mérites et de l’utilité que sa Philosophie et les recherches de ses longues etudes procuroient au genre humain; comme aussi pour l’aider à continuer ses belles experiences qui requeroient de la dépense.”
18. For his complaints about the bad treatment he received concerning this “parchment,” see René Descartes to Pierre Chanut, 31 March 1649, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings, 3:371.
19. G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 641.
20. Ibid., 645; Frederick Henry had died on March 14, 1647.
21. Batiffol, Duchesse du Chevreuse, 323–33.
22. G. Cohen, Écrivains Français en Hollande, 646.
23. Shorto, Descartes’ Bones.
24. He signed the baptismal register in the Reformed church in Deventer under the name of “Reyner Jochems” (René, son of Joachim): Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Life and Thought, 245; C. Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, 1:367, April 27, 1637.
25. On his later reputation, see, for example, Stéphane Van Damme, Descartes (Paris: Presses de Sciences Politiques, 2002); Antonio Negri, The Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, trans. Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano (London: Verso, 2007).
26. Mullin, “If Truth Were Like Money.”
27. Andrade, Gunpowder Age.