Abstract
On 1 January 1582 the poet and scholar Jean Passerat (1534–1602) sent a gift to his patron Henri de Mesmes: a poem in Latin hexameters about nothing (“De nihilo”). It became a literary sensation, prompting, over the next decades, a long and varied sequence of poetic and prose responses in Latin and vernacular languages by various authors competing to out-do Passerat, and one another, in ingenuity. Why did this poem catch the imagination of so many as the sixteenth century turned into the seventeenth? This article offers the first complete account of the ‘Nothing’ phenomenon, as it passed between multiple languages, literary genres and cultural contexts. It traces its dissemination via networks linked to institutions of learning, to academies and salons, to patrons and to coteries of poets. Focusing on the French context in particular, it then goes on to argue that the literary and political significance of these texts is greater than has hitherto been recognized.
Highlights
What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support
Passerat’s gift on New Year’s Day 1582 was a poem of 70 Latin hexameters about nothing (‘De nihilo’). It became a literary sensation, prompting, over the decades, a long and varied sequence of poetic and prose responses, in Latin, French, Greek, and other languages, sometimes in bilingual and mixed-language presentations, by various authors competing to outdo Passerat and one another in ingenuity
The trend was not confined to France
Summary
Passerat’s poem relies for its effect on a series of equivocations between the pronominal and substantive senses of ‘nothing’, or rather between its potential to signify both a negative (no-thing) and a positive concept (Nothing): ‘Nothing is more precious than jewels or gold’; ‘The Gods fear Nothing’; and so on. In 1594 there appeared Jean Demons’s (1567– 1604) bizarre Demonstration de la quatrieme partie de rien, which is presented as a response to ‘Rien’, ‘Quelque chose’, and ‘Tout’, and which promises to provide the solution to ending the religious conflict by distilling the ‘quintessence tiree du quart de rien’ by the magical invocation of divine names This text had been printed by Prévosteau, but he did not include it in the 1597 compilation, for reasons that will become apparent— the author of ‘Si peu que rien’ possibly obliquely refers to it. In a framing device added to the revised version, ‘Nemo’ appears to the poet in a dream and reproves him for allowing Passerat’s ‘Nihil’ to steal his thunder: Crede mihi, transfert iam tua regna NIHIL
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