‘On Butterflies’

‘On Butterflies’ is included in Scudéry’s 1692 Moral Dialogues [Entretiens de morale] and features the same friends who read ‘The Story of Prince Ariamène’ together. They reflect on this story, and particularly on Democritus to whom, it is suggested, the examples of quinine and lodestones should have been offered to make a case for the limitations of what can be known. The friends share a poem about quinine before they decide to read aloud the ‘Observations on Butterflies’. It transpires that these ‘Observations’ are not in fact by Democritus but rather a ‘friend of the translator’ of the manuscript in which they were purported to be found, glossed in the margins as ‘M. Betoul’: that is Élie de Bétoulaud, author of the first Chameleon poem from ‘The Story of Two Chameleons’. In the natural-historical ‘Observation on Butterflies’ we are then given a demonstration of knowledge and its limits. This text draws on a natural history tradition of copia and of descriptive language to direct attention to description over an enquiry into causes, as the author deliberately avoids the most topical contemporary question relating to the butterfly — its generation — to focus instead primarily on wing pattern and colour. After reading these ‘Observations’, the friends share some short poems celebrating the sun and close the discussion by reflecting on the necessity of worshipping God without trying to know with certainty how he operates.

Contributors

Helena Taylor

(author)

Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at University of Exeter

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5683-7967

Helena Taylor is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on the intellectual and literary history of early modern France, particularly the seventeenth century: she is interested in cultures of learning, women's varied intellectual practices and their reception, classical reception, cultural quarrels, and translation studies. Her first book, The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century Culture (OUP, 2017) examines the reception of the life of the ancient Roman poet Ovid in 17th-century French culture. Her second book, Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (OUP, 2024), was written thanks to a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, and was awarded an Honourable Mention in the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Book Prize. She is the co-editor of Ovid in French: Reception by Women from the Renaissance to the Present (OUP, 2023); and Women and Querelles in Early Modern France (a special issue of Romanic Review, 2021). Helena is currently leading a five-year project, Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, originally awarded as a European Research Council Horizon Europe Starting Grant in the 2022 round (€1.5 million) and now funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee [grant number EP/Y006372/1].