La fantaisie philosophique à la renaissance. Alice Vintenon. Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance 581. Geneva: Droz, 2017. 574 pp. $144.
brilliantly dexterous analysis of insect, animal, and human eyes (159–63). Similarly, the final chapter of the book, devoted to Adam’s and Eve’s (and the serpent’s) “paradisial labor” (169) in Paradise Lost, gives us an intriguing exploration of Miltonic indirection. At his best, then, Simon is a wonderfully acute (and sometimes very witty) reader and interpreter—his description of Milton’s serpent, who “drapes himself expansively across the garden; such is the birthright of snakes” (189), manages to convey both the sinister and the seductive quality of Milton’s creation, while it also hints at the unraveling of the future (fallen) history of both humans and serpents. Light without Heat will gain deserving accolades as an innovative study of seventeenth-century literary and scientific writing. But it will also, I suspect, prompt some less generous responses. Some will be irritated by the author’s insistence on projecting himself into the forefront of the reader’s experience of the book, an insistence that Simon underlines when, in his introductory essay—and drawing attention to his practice of making regular use of the first-person plural (28), a stylistic tic that isn’t as unusual these days as he claims—he manages to occlude the rather more intrusive projection of the first-person singular. Others will find the immensely prolix, metatextual endnotes—one of which, a meditation on Heidegger, Derrida, de Man, and (inevitably) Frederic Jameson, manages to drift over almost two pages of text (221–23)—a source of annoyance. But, as an attempt at capturing and describing the shifting moods of reflection and observation that lie at the core of so much seventeenth-century writing, Simon has nevertheless written a deeply thought-provoking book.