Nature and its monsters during the Renaissance: Montaigne and Vanini

Tristan Dagron (CNRS, Lyon)

Abstract
The Renaissance interest in monsters is well known, particularly in the guise of an aesthetic fascination for deformity and the various improbable productions of Nature. This interest also has to do with the discovery, beyond the borders of Europe, of new animal species. The goal of this paper is to show that this interest is also tied (1) to the questioning of the Peripatetic category of form and species, and its inseparably logical and metaphysical problematization and (2) to the constitution of a new image of Nature, as a virtually infinite productive power. Using two main texts, by Montaigne and by Vanini, I try to show how the monster henceforth appears as a logical problem, rather than a theological scandal, and how it expresses the crisis of a cosmos previously governed by a guiding providence. The Renaissance, in this respect, is less an anticipation of the modern scientific revolution (although it makes it possible), than it is a shake-up, a mise en crise of !the older metaphysical order, along with its intellectual and philosophical coordinates.