Chance, Literature and Culture in Early Modern France

Abstract

Chance, particularly insofar as it related to probability, has always been an important topic for writers, as well as for mathematicians, and scholars working on texts from the mid-seventeenth century onwards have often devoted their attention to literary as well as scientific ways of understanding, representing and managing the phenomenon. The collection of essays under review here thus takes its place alongside important studies such as Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability (1975) and The Taming of Chance (1990), Lorraine Daston’s Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1995) and Thomas Kavanagh’s Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance (1993), as well as a number of Marian Hobson’s essays, recently published in Networks of Enlightenment (2011), notably that devoted to Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste, and Rüdiger Campe’s Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit (2002), recently translated into English as The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist (2012). The strength of this collection lies in the fact that, whereas existing studies tend to begin in the seventeenth century and with Pascal, this one considerably extends the historical range, and though Montaigne is rather over-represented (in four of the twelve essays, those by Alain Legros, François Rigolot, Richard Regosin and Amy Wygant), there are also essays on other canonical writers such as Rabelais (François Rigolot), Racine (John Campbell), Corneille (John D. Lyons) and Descartes (Emma Gilby), as well as on lesser known texts and writers, notably the Amadis de Gaule (Virginia Krause), Gomberville’s Polexandre (Kathleen Wine), Jacques d’Auzoles-Lapeyre’s La saincte géographie (Frank Lestringant), Malebranche’s Traité de la nature et de la grâce (Michael Moriarty) and Retz’s Mémoires (Malina Stefanovska). These more than compensate for the absence of, for instance, Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz and Bernoulli, and they almost compensate for the lack of sustained discussion of Pascal, who is, incidentally, even less present in the collection than the Index claims since ‘pp. 211–214’ falls within ‘Further Reading’ and therefore, in fact, refers to four single items on the wager, one on each of pages 211, 212, 213 and 214. John D. Lyons’ Introduction does an admirable job at pulling the collection together and, better still, suggests many avenues for future enquiry.