This essay reconsiders whether the standard of a totalizing synthesis can take the appropriate measure of the epistemological orientation implicit in André Thevet’s cosmographic writings. By focusing attention on and contextualizing Thevet’s frequently repeated remark that he is describing something “in passing,” I argue that the hallmark of Thevet’s cosmographic discourse is its explicit provisionality: for all its authority and authenticity, such discourse is predicated on a belief in the inherent flux and impermanence of its object. I conclude that if we can construe Thevet’s non-totalizing, provisional cosmography as a legitimate form of cosmographic knowledge of the globe in the period, rather than as the last, tortured gasp of a self-destructing genre, we can perhaps reconsider both the value and the function of “passing knowledge” in the history of cosmographic discourse.
...MoreArticle Surekha Davies (2014) Science, New Worlds, and the Classical Tradition: An Introduction. Journal of Early Modern History (pp. 1-13).
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