Abstract

Experimentation and simulation are central to this dissertation on literary and scientific texts of seventeenth-century France and Italy. The textual practices of experimentation and simulation, common to both scientific and literary authors, shed light on the conceptual framework marking early modern divisions of knowledge. Focusing on the global history of ideas rather than reflecting today's rigid demarcation between the literary and the scientific, this comparative rereading of major classical texts by Galileo, Descartes, Moliere, and Madame de Lafayette reveals the oneness of rational endeavor in the early modern period. Using empirical testing and models of reality primarily as rhetorical and narrative devices, all four authors focus on the same object, physical and human nature. Moreover, they share a common methodology, to instruct and to please. ;Given the cultural prominence of eloquence in the early modern period, discoveries in the natural sciences could not be exposed publicly without the fine literary and rhetorical skills of the best Copernican scientists, transforming abstraction into a work of art. Copernican science owes its institutionalization less to its ability to predict natural events than to a powerful literary and cultural movement promoting experimentalism within the lay public. While Copernicans struggled to produce decisive proof of heliocentric theory, literary authors developed experimental and simulative procedures capable of predicting human behavior. Literature and art, not science, were first successful in developing experimentation and simulation, procedures we readily associate with science today. ;Toward the end of the seventeenth century, as a result of the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns, literature lost its cultural hegemony. The divided intellectuals of the so-called Republique des lettres were unable to oppose the State-controlled institutionalization of science, leading to our own current convictions about science's discursive and practical supremacy over the humanities