In his great history The Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire wrote that in the long decades of that reign “one saw established imperceptibly in Europe a literary republic . . . despite the wars and despite different religions. All the sciences, all the arts, thus received mutual assistance in this way; the academies formed this republic. . . . True scholars in each field drew closer the bonds of this great society of minds, spread everywhere and everywhere independent. This correspondence still remains; it is one of the consolations for the evils that ambition and politics spread across the earth.”
Since the 1400s learned Europeans occasionally had used the phrase “republic of letters” to refer to the social network of men (and rarely women) interested in literature and learning who kept in touch with one another by correspondence—thus in English and French a republic of letters in two senses—and who gained standing in the eyes of other participants by the quality of their learning and writing, not by their birth. This was an unthreatening “republic” in a world where that word made many princes and courtiers uneasy. All that suddenly changed, with the publication from 1684 to 1687 of a series of monthly reviews in compact duodecimo format entitled Nouvelles de la République des Lettres. A successful commercial printing venture, reaching an international audience through the rapidly developing postal systems of western Europe, the Nouvelles differed from the Acta Eruditorum and other earlier learned periodicals in its appeal to the tastes of readers who had some leisure and interest in ideas but were not professional scholars. Its reports on the latest works of philosophical and theological controversy—not as heavy going for the seventeenth-century reader, who could scarcely avoid constant exposure to these issues, as for the often baffled modern reader—frequently were lightened by asides and even modest jokes from the reviewer. The author did not hesitate to point out the weaknesses of the arguments he was reviewing or to make a plea for the principle of religious toleration and freedom of worship for all Christians in all Christian states. These views were being disseminated not by private letters but by the latest methods of production and distribution. The Republic of Letters was becoming much more political, much more of a challenge to intolerant princes.
The site of this remarkable project was Rotterdam, in Holland, Europe’s center of religious freedom and free enterprise. Its editor–main writer was a French Protestant exile named Pierre Bayle. Voltaire and the other shapers of the French Enlightenment looked back on Bayle as one of their heroic predecessors, not only one of the founders of their now deeply subversive Republic of Letters but a key source of knowledge and argument for their assaults on absolutism and traditional Christianity. Bayle was a most unlikely forefather for these assaults. Despite his anguished and furious attacks on the persecution of French Protestantism, he believed deeply in the duty of obedience to princes. A tenaciously held Scripture-based Calvinism fed his earnest moralism, and his dissections of the spurious arguments he found in almost all the philosophy and theology of his time.
Bayle was born in 1647, the son of a Protestant pastor. Poverty, Calvinism, and the mentality of a besieged religious minority were the ground notes of his youth. There can have been little doubt that he was destined for the ministry. Then in 1669 and 1670 he embraced Catholicism, studied philosophy at the Jesuit college in Toulouse, and seventeen months later returned to his home and the church of his fathers. It seems that, having grown up with the view that the pope was Antichrist, he had been overimpressed by his first exposure to rational expositions of Catholic theology, but once in a Catholic milieu he had been repelled by the images and the rituals. In his mature thought he referred to Catholicism and the paganism of ancient Greece and Rome as perverted, externalized religions that lead man away not only from the true faith but even from the ideas and moral maxims that could be derived solely from human reason. Already obsessively textual and starved for news of the world of ideas, he read and took notes indefatigably all his life, as if he never again would risk leaping to a conclusion from insufficient evidence. He finally found his vocation in making the results of his reading and thinking available to people in situations as modest and provincial as his own origins.
His apostasy from Protestantism had deeply wounded his father; his renunciation of Catholicism made his life much more dangerous. The laws of France tolerated those born Protestant but not apostates from the True Faith. In 1675 he became professor of philosophy at a Protestant academy in Sedan. But he seems to have had a more realistic sense of the mounting dangers to French Protestantism than many of his colleagues and was on the lookout for a refuge abroad. In 1681 he accepted a position at a new French-language academy of Protestant studies in Rotterdam. As signs of official hostility mounted, more and more French Protestants followed him. For some of them, the mounting menace was apocalyptic, the coming of the Antichrist. The appearance of a comet late in 1680 was to them another sign of the coming Judgment, and in the Last Days disobedience to or rebellion against earthly authorities might be called for. Bayle was more prudent and inclined to value order. Although not himself much given either to mathematics or to systematic observation, he was more persuaded by evidence than moved by religious enthusiasm. He rejected apocalyptic interpretations of the comet and continued to move in the opposite direction from the would-be prophets. He sought naturalistic explanations of natural phenomena and thought that sovereigns ought to tolerate diversity of Christian belief among their subjects and that subjects ought to obey their sovereigns. His Letter on the Comet, later retitled Various Thoughts on the Comet, drafted before he arrived in Rotterdam and published and republished in 1682–84, was widely circulated inside and outside France and marked his real breakthrough to effective writing for wide audiences.
From March 1684 to February 1687 Bayle published thirty-six numbers of the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, each about one hundred small pages. He seems to have done most of the reading and writing himself, a considerable task for which he received a modest income. In his preface to the first number he claimed that he wished to concentrate on what unites men, not what divides them. “This is the characteristic of the illustrious man in the Republic of Letters.” The books he reported on included many editions of the Latin classics and the Church Fathers, contributions to current controversies, and a bit of everything from sine tables to sympathetic assessments of the moral qualities of Moliére’s comedies to reports from Istanbul and China.
In Rotterdam Bayle was ideally placed for such a pan-European publishing venture. The craft of printing and networks of distribution were highly developed. The Dutch authorities tolerated a very wide range of published opinions. Bayle never would have been permitted to publish the Nouvelles in the France of Louis XIV. He had declared that Roman Catholics would find nothing objectionable in his work, but its evenhandedness, insistence on evidence, and the Protestant allegiance of the editor aroused misgivings. The Nouvelles found many readers in France, but sometimes it had to reach them by devious channels; many booksellers would have nothing to do with it. In 1685, when the Edict of Nantes was revoked, the Nouvelles was formally banned. Bayle’s brother in France was arrested for questioning and died in jail. (His father died the same year, before either the revocation or official hostility to his son’s works could cause him any new grief.) Grieving for his people and his father, blaming himself for his brother’s death, Bayle grew bolder, arguing for toleration of all opinions, even those that denied Christian fundamentals. The horrible news from France propelled him in 1686 and 1687 to write and publish a Philosophical Commentary on the Words of Jesus Christ “Compel Them to Come In,” in Which It Is Proved by Demonstrative Reasoning That There Is Nothing More Abominable Than to Make Conversions by Force. Here he achieved his most coherent integration of his powers of reasoning with his moral and religious passions. Saint Augustine had used these words, which Jesus spoke at the wedding in Cana, to justify the use of force in presenting the Gospel to the heathen; despite his own profound Augustinianism, Bayle rejected this whole line of argument. He saw that Christianity by having recourse to compulsion lost the inwardness and individuality that made it different from pagan practices in which one simply followed the rites of the society in which one grew up. Those who sought to force conversions were the real blasphemers. The power of early learning, of customs, was such that there always would be variety in what men believed and practiced. Our tenacity in holding to our religious convictions in the face of persecution “can only come from what remains of the good in our nature after the sin of Adam.” Religious truth is nothing until it becomes a matter of inner conviction. “In the condition in which man finds himself, God is content to demand of him that he seek the truth with as great care as he can, and that, believing he has found it, that he love it and regulate his life by it. . . . It suffices for each that he consult sincerely and in good faith the light that God gives him and that, following it, he give allegiance to the idea that seems to him most reasonable and most in accord with the Will of God.” Founded in far deeper personal commitment to Christianity than Locke’s somewhat similar ideas, approaching in a moving way the inwardness of Madame de Guyon and the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light, Bayle here also seems to leave the way open toward Enlightenment reliance on human reason and even the profound moral and spiritual perfectionism of Immanuel Kant.
As a result of stress, intense intellectual concentration, and sheer work, Bayle’s health collapsed early in 1687; he took to bed with fevers and terrible headaches. The February number of the Nouvelles was published in incomplete form, and others continued it thereafter. Bayle gave up his lectures and private pupils. Early in 1688 he was able to resume a few lectures but still was in poor health. He probably met John Locke, also a resident of Rotterdam, but there is no evidence of any influence in either direction between these two great theorists of tolerance.
Bayle never returned to the high-pressure work of publishing a monthly journal. He seems to have made good use of his months of illness and relative idleness from 1687 to 1689 to conceive an even grander project to serve the Republic of Letters by providing reliable information in usable form. By the end of 1690 he was firmly embarked on his great project to compile a Historical and Critical Dictionary, which occupied him for the rest of his life. His goal was to provide completely reliable information on ancient and modern authors and texts, “the touch-stone for other books, . . . the insurance agency for the Republic of Letters.” As in the Nouvelles, he also slipped in, frequently in the articles on the most obscure authors and subjects, a host of sharp criticisms of the dogmatisms, superstitions, and intolerance of past and present. The Dictionary was a key resource for all the thinkers of the Enlightenment and the model for the great Encyclopedia. Voltaire and many others acknowledged an immense debt to this obsessive reader and writer, who had been so determined that no one after him should be as starved for reliable and up-to-date knowledge as he had been in his father’s parsonage.
Bayle was in exile, but he was writing in French, and although he had readers in many countries, surely the audience that mattered most to him was in his now-hostile and inaccessible homeland. There 1688 may have been the year when everyone who was anyone in the cultural elite had to take sides in the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. Many literary and artistic forms were enlisted in the struggle. In his Poetical History of the War Newly Declared between the Ancients and the Modems, published in 1688, François de Callières included an elaborate engraving in the style of an order of battle map, showing the army of Greek poets, with Homer as its commander, that of Latin poets, and that of ancient orators drawn up on one side of a river, confronting the armies of French poets, of Italian and Spanish poets, and of modern orators.
In 1688 Charles Perrault published the first parts of his famous Parallel of the Ancients and the Modems. Here he escapes the regularities and pompous sonorities—the effects of bad Latin—that afflicted even moderns when they wrote poetry in the 1680s. He contributed to the development of the deft, relaxed, conversational prose that is one of the most striking features of the French Enlightenment. It is no accident that the Parallels and several other breakthrough works of this style are in dialogue form, which keeps constant pressure on the writer to preserve the flavor of ordinary speech. It also is no accident that the protagonists are portrayed carrying on their debate as they stroll through the magnificent gardens of the Palace of Versailles, seen by many as a demonstration of the superiority of the moderns and of the French monarchy.
The three protagonists of the Parallels are a president of a judicial body, who is a dogmatic champion of antiquity; a cavalier, who is good company and a man of swift wit; and an abbot, Perrault’s alter ego, who champions the moderns and has all the best lines and the longest and most thoughtful speeches. When the cavalier brings up the analogy of the history of the world with the course of a human life, the world now being in its aged decline, the abbot replies that by the same analogy we can argue that mankind has been continually accumulating experience. The modern age, he says, continually brings forth new mechanical devices, like the frame for the mechanical knitting of silk stockings, which had been invented recently. The abbot does not find it equally easy to argue for the superiority of the moderns in every art; it’s hard in sculpture but much easier in painting, where the moderns continue to discover new techniques and to achieve new wonders of verisimilitude. Architects have continued to improve on the classical rules of proportion, so that there is more beauty in the facade of the Louvre than in any ancient building.
At the end of the Parallels Perrault published in 1688 (more followed later), all three friends, even the president, exclaim over the beauties of the sculptures and fountains of Versailles, the abbot saving special praise for the Three Fountains area, with its water, grass, and trees, so skillfully arranged that the artifice disappears and the beauty seems natural. The argument for the superior polish and regularity of the modern seems to give way to an anticipation of the eighteenth-century revolt against regularity and order.
Some would say that by 1688 Perrault’s championing of the moderns was no longer anything like an uphill battle, that most articulate opinion in the French elite was moving his way. Perrault’s personal circumstances suggest the contexts in which such a shift was taking place. His father was a prosperous lawyer, the kind of man who contributed to and benefited most from the royal centralization under Louis XIV. No expense was spared in the education of the Perrault brothers. They learned their classics well but also wrote verse burlesques of the Aeneid and other classics, their writing sessions sometimes dissolving into unstoppable fits of laughter. One brother became a lawyer, another an expert in government finance, yet another a vehemently anti-Jesuit Jansenist theologian, while Claude, fifteen years older than Charles, was a physician, architect, and biologist. After the rapid rise and disgrace of the financier, it was Claude’s work as a supervisor of building projects for the great minister Colbert that assured the family’s fortunes and shaped his own conviction that no past age could match the splendor and sophistication of the Age of Louis the Great.
Charles and Claude both were founding members of the Academy of Sciences, another of Colbert’s image-building projects that also aimed to mobilize new forms of knowledge in the service of the monarchy. Claude, much more interested in dissection and experiment than most physicians of his time, was placed in charge of the academy’s efforts to broaden biological knowledge by dissecting various animals, both domestic and exotic. The dissections were the work, Claude Perrault wrote, of “a company, composed of people who have eyes for such things more than most of the rest of the world, as well as hands to search for them with more dexterity and success; who see what is, and whom it would be hard to persuade to see what is not; who are not so eager to find new things as to examine well what one claims to have found; and to whom the assurance of having been mistaken in some observation gives no less satisfaction than a curious and important discovery; so much does the love of certainty prevail over everything else in their spirits” It would be hard to find a more elegant expression of the ideal of the advancement of knowledge through public, collective, falsifiable inquiry.
The dissections were not for the faint of stomach; the dissection of a bear that had died of diseased lungs and intestines released such a stench that pints of brandy were poured over the carcass. Between 1668 and 1676 specimens of over thirty species were dissected. Observations of a live chameleon and later dissections corrected many mistakes in the descriptions found in Pliny and other classical authors. In 1671 and 1676 Claude Perrault published the results of these investigations in two splendid volumes of Memoirs for a Natural History of the Animals, with remarkable engravings of the external appearances of the animals and key aspects of their dissected viscera and limb structures. This work continued into the 1680s, and in 1688 preparations were well advanced for a supplementary volume.
At the same time that Claude Perrault was supervising the early stages of this ambitious project in scientific observation, he was engaged in another project for Colbert, a translation of Vitruvius, the greatest Latin text on architecture. His medical education had required substantial learning in Greek and Latin, enabling him to deal smoothly with Vitruvius’s odd vocabulary and many digressions. The translation contains plates illustrating Vitruvius’s ideas and classifications that are as detailed and as clear in delineation of structure as those of dissected animals in the Memoirs. He went on to publish an Abridgment of Vitruvius, in which he managed some first statements of his own way of thinking about architecture. Architectural beauty, he wrote, is in some respects natural or “positive,” inherent in the work itself, but it is mainly the result of arbitrary creation. What we admire is the clarity and coherence of the architect’s inventions. Our admiration for the ancients is directed at that in which we can and do surpass them: their inventiveness, their clear and systematic development of their ideas, and even their links to the age of a great ruler. By the time Claude Perrault published these ideas in their fullest form, in his Order of Five Types of Columns according to the Method of the Ancients (1683), he had had some excellent opportunities to put them into practice. Although the details are controversial, it is clear that he made substantial contributions to the great east facade of the Louvre as it went through many changes between 1670 and 1680. His passions for science and architecture, royal glory and the work of the academy came together wonderfully in his designs for the Paris Observatory, completed in 1683 and still standing.
Claude Perrault’s plans for a triumphal arch for the Faubourg St. Antoine were approved, and first stages of construction were under way when Colbert, the brothers’ patron, died in 1683. Construction stopped and never resumed. Claude continued his dissections and preparations for a supplementary volume of the Memoirs. In the fall of 1688 he contracted an infection during the dissection of a camel and died on October 9. The anatomical plates that already had been prepared were not published until 1733.
Charles Perrault went on to publish his most famous work, the Tales of Mother Goose, in 1697. It was as if he had continued to stroll away from classical rigor into a lovely woodland where the voices of the simple and unlettered could be heard.
The Republic of Letters was a creation of Europe, with centers not just in Paris, London, and the Dutch cities but also in Venice, where Coronelli’s map projects were under way, and in Leipzig, where the Acta Eruditorum was published. Some of its occasional participants wrote from incredible distances: Ambon, Batavia, Beijing. But to men of that time, and perhaps to us today, one of the more surprising of the men of learning was the lord of a fine little castle on the south slope of the Sava River valley, roughly halfway between Venice and Vienna.
Janez Vajkard Valvasor, baron of Bogen
perk,* spent 1688 working hard on the plates and the proofreading of his magnum opus, four huge volumes entitled The Honor of the Duchy of Camiola (Die Ehre des Herzogtums Krain). In that year he also published a Latin Topography of the Archduchy of Carinthia. At the end of the previous year he had known that he was about to be elected a member of the Royal Society of London, one of the most influential centers of the scientific province of the Republic of Letters. He had sent off to that society a detailed report on the famous and mysterious Cerknica Lake in his homeland. At the end of 1688, however, he still had no word that he had actually been elected, nor did he know that a summary of his report on the lake had appeared in the Philosophical Transactions. The physical distance from the Sava Valley to London was not enormous, but communications were by no means always reliable.
Carniola had been ruled by the Hapsburgs for centuries. German and Latin were the languages used by Valvasor and the rest of its elite in formal communication; the common people mostly spoke Slovenian, and almost certainly it was Valvasor’s first language. The capital of the county, the urban center of Valvasor’s world, was Ljubljana, Laibach in German; today it is the capital of independent Slovenia. The Sava has its origin in a waterfall above a mountain lake in the Julian Alps; it joins the Danube at Belgrade. Later in this book we shall meet a young Turk who spent some miserable months in 1688 as a prisoner somewhere along the Sava. Valvasor wrote of his Bogenperk castle as a landowner’s dream, with sloping but fertile fields, fine cherry orchards, springs inside and outside the castle, and views across the valley and toward the snowy peaks of the Alps to the north. It was perhaps a day’s ride from Ljubljana, but he had all he needed at Bogenperk: chemical apparatus for his experiments, several thousand books, a workshop for copper engraving.
Carniola is a lovely and varied country. There is good land for farms and roads, especially in the river valleys; but between them there are low, forested mountains, and in early modern times travel was especially difficult in the winter snows. Moreover, much of the bedrock is limestone. Water seeps through horizontal and vertical fissures in limestone and dissolves away caves and underground rivers. The roofs of such chambers may fall in to produce odd cliffs, spires, closed-off sinkholes and valleys; geologists call this karst topography, after a region in Carniola. Isolated pockets of farm settlement in such broken-up country are especially apt to produce distinctive local customs, beliefs and dialects that change every few miles. Rivers disappearing into sinkholes or gushing suddenly from mountain-sides, caves full of stalactites and stalagmites reinforce local beliefs in uncanny subterranean forces.
Valvasor was the grandson of an immigrant from Italy in the sixteenth century, one of many who brought their skills in mining, crafts, and commerce to the region in those times. His grandfather had been bequeathed a small castle by a distant relative or employer of the same surname. Born in 1641, Valvasor enjoyed all the advantages of a provincial elite: a good Jesuit education in Ljubljana, military experience in a campaign against the Turks, and more than eight years of travel in western Europe and even to North Africa. Then in 1672 he married and bought Bogenperk and other properties. In his travels he had seen quite a few books that collected information on the history, great families, buildings, and natural wonders of particular areas; such works were particularly common as expressions of local pride in the German lands. He had found that no one had heard of Carniola. (Present-day Slovenians have the same problem.)
Stopping at home often enough to keep his young wife pregnant (they had nine children in fifteen years of marriage), he spent much of his time traveling through Carniola and neighboring areas, sketching castles and cloisters, collecting information on towns and noble families, puzzling out some of the strange features of the landscape. He collected antiquities and strange objects and experimented with chemistry and alchemy. His first publication was a Latin Topography of the archduchy of Carinthia, with 223 copper plates. Finding no copper engraving shop in Ljubljana, he set up his own at Bogenperk, the first in the archduchy. He published other topographical works, a rather oddly illustrated edition of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, and a Theater of Human Death, describing and illustrating various grisly forms of death suffered by sinners.
But Valvasor’s real life’s work was to make his beloved homeland known and to make a full record of its history, people, and natural wonders. Already in 1680 he had printed a notice asking people to send him information about their localities, their families, their castles. People were especially unwilling to give a stranger full descriptions of their castles, but as he traveled around, he accumulated more and more. He employed a number of artists and engravers. By 1687 he was able to start preparing The Honor of the Duchy of Carniola for publication. He asked the scholar Erasmus Franciscus in Nuremberg to go over his text and make his German regular and correct. By 1688 printed sheets were arriving at Bogenperk, while more manuscript and illustrations made their way to Nuremberg. When completed and bound in 1689, it was a work of four splendid folio volumes, totaling 3,532 pages with 528 illustrations. It gave encyclopedic coverage to the history of the area since ancient times, including its various peoples and languages, its conversion to Christianity, and the long and victorious struggle of Catholicism against Protestantism; all its noble families, including their coats of arms; all its towns, cloisters, and castles, with illustrations; and the many rivers, springs, and caves.
In his great work and in other letters and records from 1687 and 1688, we find Valvasor reflecting an old Europe of witchcraft, pacts with the devil, and subterranean forces, at the same time that he was communicating with one of the centers of a new Europe, the Royal Society of London, where such themes were much less visible. He devoted one short section of his huge volumes to the superstitions and witchcraft beliefs of the people of Carniola, commenting that “it would be easier to find a land where there are no snakes than one that is entirely lacking in superstitious people.” He particularly deplored the number and persistence of superstitious customs around the Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter. Carniolan peasants always put big logs on their hearth fires on Christmas Eve and placed on them a piece or spoonful of every item in their feasts, bidding the fire to eat along with them, clearly a survival, Valvasor said, of pagan sacrifices to the household god.
In this and in other scattered discussions on witchcraft and the works of the devil, Valvasor sought explanations through historical survivals or natural causes of apparently magical phenomena. Erasmus Franciscus of Nuremberg, who was editing Valvasor’s work and making occasional additions to it, was much less inclined to explain away people’s stories and fears of the devil and his works. In Book XI of the great work, ostensibly devoted to the cities, markets, and castles of Carniola, the editor began to include whole paragraphs in which he disputed the accounts of these matters given by “the honorable principal author"; the result is over fifty big folio pages of written debate on the theory of witchcraft and the works of the devil. These pages, in Volume III, probably were completed and in Valvasor’s hands early in 1688, but there is one late addition recording an experience of his in that year.
Valvasor and Erasmus Franciscus agreed that there were many types of implicit and explicit pacts with the devil. Valvasor found the concept of the implicit pact troubling. What if a child stepped on a bewitched stone or innocently copied the words or gestures of a witch? Was the innocent child thus caught in an implicit pact with the devil and damned? Erasmus Franciscus replied that an implicit pact cannot have effect without the awareness of the person making it. In another connection Valvasor asserted that the devil has no power over the virtuous. The devil might give someone an invention that is effective for natural reasons, like a silk-finishing process he had heard about at Lyons; those who make use of it without awareness of its origins will be in no way caught in an implicit pact. And so this extended debate on ancient Christian fears and even older beliefs in dark supernatural powers turned toward questions of subjective belief and intention much like those we also see in the different religious worlds of Locke, Bayle, and William Penn.
Not to say that Valvasor did not believe in the devil and his works: On March 8, 1688, as he was reading over some of the material he had previously prepared on this subject, there was a huge crash above him, and then another. He feared the roof was falling in but also seems to have sensed that he was playing with eternal fire. The danger went away after he recited several prayers and formulas, the last ending “you have no power to harm a hair of my head.”
The Cerknica Lake in Carniola had been commented on by travelers and students of nature since the time of the classical geographer Strabo. At times it was simply a wide, grassy plain. Then water would rise out of openings in the plain, bringing abundant supplies of fish with it. Months later the water would drain away completely. Valvasor spent quite a bit of time exploring the lake and the area around it by boat and on foot. He was by no means the first to see that it must be fed and drained by the underground streams that were so common in the karst country. It was his awareness of an account of it by the English traveler Edward Brown that prompted him to send his first letter to the Royal Society in London in December 1685. Several letters were exchanged in 1686, and Valvasor sent in an extended report on a new process he had developed for the casting of large bronze statues. This was received with general approbation, and in 1687 Valvasor knew that he was about to be nominated for membership in the august society. In December 1687 he sent in an elaborate report on the Cerknica Lake. He believed that there must be an underground reservoir higher up in the mountains that filled up with runoff from the melting snows and drained by underground passages into a reservoir below the bottom of the lake, from which there was only one outlet channel of limited volume. At the peak runoff this reservoir filled up, and water gushed through channels in its roof into the bed of the lake. As the flow slackened, the reservoir beneath the lake drained to the point where the lake waters could drain back into it. On December 14, 1687, the first part of Valvasor’s paper on Cerknica Lake was read to the Royal Society by Edmond Halley, who had built out of basins and tubing an elaborate model of Valvasor’s mental model; apparently it worked. Valvasor’s report was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the society and later in the Acta Eruditorum. At the same December 1687 meeting Valvasor was formally elected to membership in the society. Late in 1688 Valvasor was writing to the society to inquire if his report sent the year before had reached London. There is no evidence that he ever knew that his report on the lake had been so well received or that he had been formally elected. The Honor of the Duchy of Carniola was published in 1689. But Valvasor was broken in finances and probably in health. In 1690 he sold his books and prints, and in 1692 he had to part with his beloved Bogenperk estate. He died in 1693.
Valvasor’s work on the Cerknica Lake was accompanied by an elaborate bird’s-eye view and an intricate chart of the underground channels as he conceived them. But naturalistic explanation of the powers below the earth had not triumphed entirely; in the upper left of the bird’s-eye view is a nearby mountain, with witches flying above it. Elsewhere in his great book Valvasor describes a few occasions on which he ventured into caves. He was acutely aware of the dangers of dropoffs in the dark into huge sinkholes. An illustration makes his fears and ambivalences stunningly clear. The general pattern of stalactites and stalagmites will look familiar to anyone who has visited such a cave, but in Valvasor’s print they all are turning into devilish masks, monsters, and body parts. One of the two human figures in the foreground, pointing to the shapes, probably is Valvasor, observing a subterranean world that he would like to view naturalistically but that still awakens fear and loathing.
Valvasor in a cave
*Johann Weichard Valvasor, baron of Wagensberg, in German. I use Slovenian forms rather than German as far as possible, except for the English/Latin Camiola for Krain or Kranjska.