‘Relation curieuse de l’Île de Bornéo’: Fontenelle’s Curious Response to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

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The ‘Relation curieuse de l’Île de Bornéo’ was published in the January 1686 issue of Pierre Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République and introduced as the work of Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle. The ‘Relation curieuse’ is not merely a transparent mask under which Bayle could publish Fontenelle’s radical response to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Fontenelle appropriates the travel relation not only to reinterpret the religious situation in France, but also to interrogate the means whereby French men and women related to that conflict. The ‘Relation curieuse’ casts away the interconfessional violence that was crucial in the formation of the modern French state as something strange, and exposed the objectifying function of the relation that served in religious controversy. Fontenelle’s ‘Relation curieuse’ offers a rare example to reconsider the uses of the relation, the travel relation and curiosity towards reflexive critical ends in early modern France.