2 L'Uranologie, ou le Ciel (Paris: Julien, 1583, in-8°), fol. 32^r. In all quotations, unless otherwise indicated, the sixteenth-century text has been followed except for the standard orthographical modernizations of j to i and u to v.

3 Like all but one of the nine known manuscripts of Buchanan's poem, the version used by Du Monin, the earliest on record, has since disappeared. In this instance, however, his text is unmistakably close to that of Buchanan, which was first published at Paris in 1585. See The Sphera of George Buchanan (1506-1582), ed. and tr. James R. Naiden [1952], pp. 109 and 151-152.

4 For an authoritative reconstruction of the history of French Renaissance learned poetry and a detailed analysis of the most important works, see Albert-Marie Schmidt, La Poesie scientifique en France au seizikme siecle (Paris, 1938). I am indebted to this study for many suggestions and details, although M. Schmidt considers the cosmic voyage only incidentally and unsystematically.

As far as I am aware, no comprehensive history of the cosmic voyage in French literature has ever been written. The sixteenth-century form with which this paper is concerned is not considered in such related but variously oriented works as Geoffroy Atkinson, The Extraordinary Voyage in French Literature before 1700 (New York, 1920); Jean-Jacques Bridenne, La Litterature francaise a“imagination scientifique (Paris, 1950); Camille Flammarion, Les Mondes imaginaires et les monies reels, 5e ed. (Paris, 1866); and Marjorie H. Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (New York, 1948).

5 A few authors of such works did at least mention the theme. See, e.g., Pierre de Dampmartin, De la Connoissance et merveilles du monde et de Vhomme (Paris: Perier, 1585, in-fol.), fol. I2V, and Pierre de La Primaudaye, Academic francoise, 3e ed. (Basle: Philemon de Hus, 1587, in-8°), fol. 5V. Much earlier in the century, in Les Institutions astronomiques (Paris: Vascosan, 1557, in-fol.), one of the first works on astronomy published in France ^* in the vernacular, the author, Jean-Pierre de Mesmes, alludes in his preface to the ability of human thought to fly at will through the heavens and beyond, without the aid of wings (fol. a iii^r); and in his first chapter he in effect explains why the learned poets of his time undertook their cosmic voyages: ‘Mais si quelque habil’ homme me demandoit a ccste heure, Par quel moyen peult on cognoistre telz effects, entendu qu'aucun n'alla jamais au Cicl pour en rapporter 5a bas des nouvelles? Response: la seule experience nous faict sages’ (p. 3).

6 See my article, ‘A Sixteenth-century French Cosmic Voyage: Nouvelles des regions de la lime', Studies in the Renaissance IV (1957), 169-189.

7 A thorough examination of Peletier's complete production oflcarncd verse may be found in Schmidt, op. cit., pp. 7-69. For an interesting analysis of his cosmic flight as an example of the art of poetry, see “Weber, Henri, ha Creation poetiquc au XVI” sihk on France de Maurice Sceve a Agrippa d'Aubigne (Paris, 1956), pp. 465-478.Google Scholar

8 L'Amour des amours. Vers liriques (Lyon: Jn de Tournes, 1555, in-8°). All references to the work in my text are to this edition.

9 In an ode to Marguerite de France, sister of Henri n, which was published in the same volume, Peletier acknowledges that the love sonnets had been written in obedience to current poetic fashion, and gives as the motivation of his flight his belief that the time was ripe for verse of a higher aspiration and more serious content. Indeed, he could see ‘la France lasse | De voler d'une ele si basse’ (p. 119).

10 Cf. Divina Commedia, ‘Paradiso', I, lines 46-54 and 64-66.

11 Euvres poetiques … intitulez Louanges. Aveq quelques autres ecriz du mime auteur, artcores non publiez (Paris: Coulombel, 1581, in-4^o), fols. 62^r-63^v.

12 This way of looking at the centrality of the sun appears frequently in the works of sixteenth-century writers who rejected as an absurdity the more properly heliocentric hypothesis involving an axially-rotating, sun-circling earth. Among French prose works, see, e.g., Mesmes, op. cit., pp. 24-26, and Jean Bodin, Le Theatre de la nature universelle, tr. Fougerolles (Lyon: Pillehotte, 1597, in-8°), p. 830; for works in verse, see, e.g., Guy Le Fevre de la Boderie, La Galliade, ou de la revolution des arts et sciences (Paris: Chaudiere, 1578, in-40), fol. 6^V, and Du Monin, op. cit., fols. 20^r and 38^v.

13 An interesting indication of the success of Peletier's voyage is that even Du Bellay, who by taste and temperament was perhaps the farthest removed from learned poetry of all the members of the Pleiade, remarked that his enthusiasm for this fiction was so great that he too was considering a flight to the heavens, on the wings not of love or science but of virtue, in order to sing its praises and fill ‘ce grand espace vuyde’ with its name. See sonnets CLVI and CLXXXIX of Les Regrets, in his CEuvres poetiques, ed. Henri Chamard, 11 (Paris, 1910), 177 and 201-202.

14 Peletier had sufficient poetic sensitivity to be well aware of the difficulties involved in putting scientific and philosophic material into verse form. In his Art poetique, published in 1555, there is this almost wistful remark, whose truth he knew from working on 'L'Uranie', but which certain of his emulators seem never to have realized: ‘Les fez de la Nature se peuvent aussi treter en Poesie: combien ancores que l'aprete des termes e la contreinte de la matiere, qui et sans ornemens e figures, face que l'antreprise et rare pour le Poete’ (L'Art poetique de Jacques Peletier du Mans [1555], ed. Andre Boulanger, Paris, 1930, P-82).

15 For an ingenious reversal of Peletier's theme, see Jean Bertaut, CEuvres poetiques, ed. Adolphe Cheneviere (Paris, 1891), pp. 387-400. This is an ‘elegie’ in which the poet, recently disappointed in love and now consoling himself by scaling the heavens ‘sur l'aile du penser', intending to report his firsthand observations and findings, is literally brought back to earth by Cupid, who rebukes him for no longer singing of love and gives him a new lady as the object of his devotion.

16 One of the most hackneyed of themes in French Renaissance love poetry was the flight of Icarus, of which perhaps the best-known example is the first sonnet of Lei Amours d'Hippolyte (1573) of Desportes. See his CEuvres, ed. Alfred Michiels (Paris, 1858), p. 115. For representative examples of ascensions more in the Neoplatonic tradition, see Sceve, Delie, ed. Eugene Parturier (Paris, 1916), pp. 115-116 (no. CLVII); Du Bellay, CEuvres poetiques, ed. cit., 1 (Paris, 1908), 143 (no. vi of the XIII. Sonnetz de Vhonneste amour); and Ronsard,CEuvres completes, ed. Paul Laumonier, iv (Paris, 1925, S.T.F.M.), 134—135 (no. cxxxrx of Lei Amours of 1552). A third type of conventional cosmic flight which will not be considered in this paper is that of the soul after death. One of the finest written in sixteenth-century France is Ronsard's ‘Hymne triumphal', published in 1551 in a collection entitled Le Tombeau de Marguerite de Valois Royne de Navarre. After eulogizing the life of the deceased, the poet describes how her body was taken by an angel to the firmament to become a benign new star, while her soul continued on to its eternal abode in the Empyrean. See his CEuvres completes, ed. cit., ra (Paris, 1921), 54-78.

17 For a study of Ba'if's work as a scientific poet, see Schmidt, op. cit., pp. 167-176.

18 Le Premier des meteores (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1567, in-4^o). All references to the work in my text are to this edition. 19 For a similar contemporary attitude toward comets, see The Universe of Pontus de Tyard, a Critical Edition ofL'Unipers, ed. John C. Lapp (Ithaca, 1950), pp. 73-77. For a resume of the more representative sixteenth-century view, accepting both the maleficence of comets and the Aristotelian doctrines of their nature and location, sec The Works ofGuillaume De Salluste Sieur Du Bartas, ed. Holmes, Lyons, and Linker, II (Chapel Hill, 1938), 245-246 and 253-254.

20 It is thoroughly consistent with Renaissance thought that a discussion of the Milky Way should be included in a work on meteors, for this was a generic term for all kinds of inanimate objects of a mixed nature, whether in the sky, in the air, or on or beneath the surface of the earth.

21 See, for example, Sceve, Le Microcosme (Lyon: Jan de Tournes, 1562, in-4⁰), p. 73, and, even at the end of the century, Jean de Champaignac, Physique francoise (Bordeaux: Millanges, 1595, in-8°), pp. 258-260. For contemporaries who agreed rather with Baif's first explanation of the Milky Way, see Mesmes, op. cit., pp. 17-18, and Isaac Habert, Les Trois livres des meteores avecques autres ceuvrespoetiques (Paris: Richer, 1585, in-120), fol. 23^r.

22 All references to L'Uranologie are to the edition cited above, note 2. For a general study of this work, see Schmidt, op. tit., pp. 269-282. Although this paper does not pretend to offer a complete survey of the French Renaissance cosmic voyage in verse, even of the exploratory or corroborative type, it may be of interest to take brief note of three well-known poets who also used but seem never to have developed the theme. Ronsard, for example, several times includes but fails to elaborate upon the old notion of the spirit of the philosopher-poet escaping its earthbound body, roaming the heavens, and reporting its findings. See, e.g., the beginnings of the ‘Hymne de la philosophie’ (1555), the ‘Hymne des astres’ (1555), and ‘L'Excellence de l'esprit de 1'homme’ (1559), CEuvres completes, ed. tit., vni (Paris, 1935), 86-87, I5°. and x (Paris, 1939), 102-103. The third book of Sceve's Le Microcosme (1562) contains a long treatise on astronomy and astrology whose opening line, ‘Puis Astronome au Ciel son voyage entreprent’ ﹛ed. tit., p. 70), suggests that Adam, the hero of the work, is about to conduct Eve on a cosmic flight. He does so only in a figurative sense, however, the ‘voyage’ being but a school lesson in which he traces diagrams of the celestial sphere on the ground in front of his attentive pupil. The Premiere Sepmaine (1578) of Du Bartas includes several highly imaginative but never developed flights. A startling variation appears, for instance, in the ‘Second Jour', where, to insure the accuracy of his data on meteors, the poet flies to the upper air not on wings or in a chariot, but riding on the shoulders of an unusually compliant Uranie. Later, at the start of the ‘Quatriesme Jour', like Elijah of old he is transported to the heavens by the Holy Spirit in a fiery chariot. In neither case, however, does the poet elaborate upon these fictions to lend authority or originality to his rimed catalogues of the sublunary and supralunary regions. See The Works of… Du Bartas, ed. tit.,11, 236 and 305.

23 Less open-minded than Du Monin on this question was the savant and philosopher Guy Le Fevre de la Boderie, who, some years earlier in his long and difficult poem entitled L'Encydie des secrets de Veternite (Anvers: Plantin, 1571, in-40), had used the fiction of a cosmic voyage for the express purpose of thoroughly refuting the theories of the infinity of the universe and plurality of worlds in and outside it. In the event that the Aristotelian and religious arguments which she first presents against those notions prove not completely convincing, Uranie invites the poet to accompany her on a flight beyond the highest heaven. By this means he ‘sees for himself that the world is indeed finite and inhabited only at its center, the earth, and that there are no other worlds scattered through the emptiness around it, as Leucippus and Democritus had maintained long before. La Boderie's journey is made, incidentally, ‘on the wings of thought', which, Uranie points out, can go where it will throughout the universe, without need of wings, machine, or other motive force such as the body would require, and also without hindrance from what the body would find dangerous if not insuperable obstacles: first the meteors and the sublunary fire, then the aether and the rays of the sun, and finally the rapidly moving, solid spheres of the planets and firmament. See L'Encydie, ed. cit., pp. 78-86.

24 This is an additional characteristic which distinguishes the French sixteenth-century voyages of cosmic exploration from those written in the post-telescopic age. Domingo Gonsales, the hero of Godwin's Man in the Moone (1638), observes with his own eyes the diurnal axial rotation of the earth. And Cyrano experiences its truth, as it were, in Les Estats et empires de la lune (1657), by taking off from France on his first effort to reach the moon and finding himself in Quebec when he comes down. Later, while on his voyage to the sun (1662), he visually confirms the Copernican theory.

25 La Morocosmie, ou, de la folic, vanite, et inconstance du monde (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1583, in-40). All references in my text are to this edition. For a discussion of this work and of Le Grand miroir du monde, the versified encyclopedia which Du Chesne published in 1587, see Schmidt, op. cit., pp. 294-303.

26 The fact that Calliope has replaced her sister Uranie as the poet's guide and companion epitomizes the difference in purpose and content between his journey of epic proportions yet pious intentions and the scientifically-oriented cosmic expeditions of such contemporaries as Peletier and Baif.

27 In this connection, it is noteworthy that unlike Dante and Beatrice, Du Chesne and Calliope do not meet, or at least do not report that they do, the various categories of the souls of the dead inhabiting the planetary stations on the way to the Empyrean. The possibility of mortal life on any of the planets or stars is also ignored by Du Chesne, where contemporary cosmic voyagers such as Du Monin and La Boderie had expressly refuted it. As far as France is concerned, it was not until the publication of the Nouvelles des regions de la lune, in 1595, that the notion of plurality was given any authentication, as it were, by the fiction of a cosmic voyage.

28 To the best of my knowledge, the only French poetic flight that resembles Du Chesne's, in its religious inspiration if not its form and content, is the cosmic vision which is related in 'Les Fers', book v oiLes Tragiques (1616) of his coreligionist, Agrippa d'Aubigne. While he was unconscious after being seriously wounded in an assassination attempt shortly after the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, the poet's spirit flew to the heavens, witnessed past events and the future course of the French religious wars, saw beneath him the star of 1572, sent as a divine presage of the death of Charles IX, and had a revelation of his mission to write his great poem. See Les Tragiques, ed. Gamier et Plattard, in (Paris, 1932), 194-216.

29 These lines are in effect an admonition to the pride and confidence of those contemporaries of Du Chesne who, with Ronsard, could say of the learned poet: ‘II cognoist la nature, & les secrets des Cieux, | Et d'un esprit bouillant s'esleve entre les Dieux’ ﹛CEuvres completes, ed. cit., xn, Paris, 1946, 47). For an authoritative study of this whole question, see John Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science (New York, i960), pp. 50-74.

30 As far as I have been able to determine, no extended cosmic voyages in verse were written in France after those of Du Monin and Du Chesne, except for D'Aubigne's religious vision and the conventional flights of lovers and the souls of the dead. One of the last products of the vogue of learned, didactic verse, Gamon's La Semaine, ou creation du tnonde, contre celle du Sieur du Bartas (1609), pays some lip service to the need of a trip to the heavens by the poet who wishes to be truly informed, but nowhere gives the fiction a real development. See the 2e edition (Lyon: Morillon, 1609, in-12^o), pp. 14, 29, 33, and 105. The equally undeveloped voyages in books 1 and vn of Riviere's Le Zodiac poetique (Paris: Libert, 1619, in-8°), pp. 2 and 203-204, are imitated from the Zodiacus vitae of Palingenius, as is the long trip to the moon in book ix, pp. 303-348.

31 It is symptomatic of this trend that Du Chesne's attitude toward the sciences and their devotees, although reflecting a very different, rigorously otherworldly outlook on life, should be fundamentally so similar to that expressed a few years earlier in Montaigne's 'Apologie de Raimond Sebond'. See the Essais, ed. Maurice Rat, 11 (Paris, 1941), 129-131,175-176 ('La peste de l'homme, c'estl'opiniondescavoir’), 204,276-277, et passim. Cf. also the related point of view in the sonnet on the ‘imbecillite de l'esprit curieus' by the Catholic Jean-Baptiste Chassignet, in Le Mespris de la vie et consolation contre la mort (1594), ed. Armand Muller (Geneve et Lille, 1953), p. 126.