Descartes and the 'Ingenium' tracks the significance of embodied thought (ingenium) in the philosophical trajectory of the founding father of dualism. The first part of the book defines the notion of ingenium in relation to core concepts of Descartes's philosophy, such as memory and enumeration. It focuses on Descartes's uses of this notion in methodical thinking, mathematics, and medicine. The studies in the second part place the Cartesian ingenium within preceding scholastic and humanist pedagogical and natural-philosophical traditions, and highlight its hitherto ignored social and political significance for Descartes himself as a member of the Republic of Letters. By embedding Descartes' notion of ingenium in contemporaneous medical, pedagogical, but also social and literary discourses, this volume outlines the fundamentally anthropological and ethical underpinnings of Descartes's revolutionary epistemology. Contributors: Igor Agostini, Roger Ariew, Harold J. Cook, Raphaele Garrod, Denis Kambouchner, Alexander Marr, Richard Oosterhoff, David Rabouin, Dennis L. Sepper, and Theo Verbeek.

Natural History in Early Modern France offers a longue duree account of recurring poetic structures of the genre through case studies spanning from the Renaissance to the eve of the nineteenth century. These case studies reveal the lasting epistemic importance of bookish knowledge and commonplacing in the natural-historical description from Belon to Buffon. They also highlight the French reception of Baconianism. Natural History in Early Modern France makes a case for the literary status of the genre by attending to the permanence of its 'Plinian' features, such as wonders. Natural history was not only concerned with increasingly rational modes of ordering natural particulars: this book reveals its enduring social, affective, spiritual, and aesthetic underpinnings. Contributors are: Peter Anstey, Susan Broomhall, Isabelle Charmantier, Arlette Fruet, Raphaele Garrod, Paul Gibbard, Dana Jalobeanu, Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, Stephane Schmitt, Paul J. Smith, and Stephane Van Damme.

This volume of essays contributes to our understanding of the ways in which the Jesuits employed emotions to "change hearts"-that is, convert or reform-both in Europe and in the overseas missions. The early modern Society of Jesus excited and channeled emotion through sacred oratory, Latin poetry, plays, operas, art, and architecture; it inflamed young men with holy desire to die for their faith in foreign lands; its missionaries initiated dialogue with and 'accommodated' to non-European cultural and emotional regimes. The early modern Jesuits conducted, in all senses of the word, much of the emotional energy of their times. As such, they provide a compelling focus for research into the links between rhetoric and emotion, performance and devotion, from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.