172 Book Reviews: Early Modern

Harold J. Cook. The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War. xvi + 276 pp., notes,
index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2018. $35 (cloth). ISBN
9780226462967.

This book is about Descartes before he settled semipermanently in the Dutch Republic and published a
number of now-celebrated books in philosophy, science, and mathematics. It is the author’s aim to dis-
cover the person Descartes was before he decided to write, tracing his career as a courtier and a soldier.
With fervor, Harold J. Cook describes Descartes’s adventurous journeys throughout Europe, from one
siege or battlefield to another, and his advancement in the circles of the French high nobility, siding with
the opponents of Richelieu. He argues that Descartes left France as an exile in 1629, to keep himself safe
from Richelieu’s agents. In the preface and the first chapter of The Young Descartes the author presents his
personal opinion regarding the standard view of Descartes’s life, as told by “the experts.” Cook reproaches
modern experts for dismissing much of the information supplied by Descartes’s important seventeenth-
century biographer, Adrien Baillet, who could draw on material that has long since been lost. These ex-
perts, however, have their reasons for not accepting everything Baillet reveals. Baillet scrupulously refers in
the margin of his book to the sources whenever he uses them. It is in the absence of such references that
the alarm sounds for the likelihood of fabulation. Cook ignores the alarm bells, however, and takes Baillet
as the starting point for his version of Descartes’s life up to his departure from France in 1629. But when
we weigh all the evidence brought forward, depicting Descartes as an exile seems exaggerated, unless this
is understood as meaning no more than that he was attempting to get away from court life and from his
nosy friends and family—and since all that can in fact be found in Descartes’s own letters and works, there
would be nothing new here.
Cook is proud to present a number of new trails of evidence—most of which are, however, doubtful if not
false. I will shortly discuss a few examples that, regrettably, point to more general tendencies in the book.
Cook introduces a previously unknown ancestor of the philosopher, a great-great-grandfather, called the
Great René, a military figure in whose footsteps “our René” would follow (pp. xii, 33–35). This must be
a baffling misunderstanding of a phrase in the genealogical article Cook refers to: “Pierre Descartes, l’aïeul
du grand René.” The correct meaning of the phrase is “Pierre Descartes, the grandfather of the great René,”
and not, as Cook would have it, “Pierre Descartes, the grandson of the great René.” This is one of several
instances where Cook distills the opposite meaning from what is actually written in the sources used.
To illustrate the reputation of Joachim Descartes, René’s father, in the eyes of the chief persons of the
kingdom, Cook dwells on an exciting history of espionage as told in the memoirs of the Duc de Sully
(pp. 37, 75, 86, 168, 213). In 1604 a secretary to the French ambassador in Spain, who went by the name
Descartes, played an important role in the discovery of a spy network. Cook, stating that at the time there
were no persons other than Joachim Descartes known by that surname, believes it likely that the Descartes
in question is René’s father. This is a naive conclusion for a historian to draw, and it is demonstrably false.
Some digging in the online resources offered by Gallica (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Manuscript
dep., FF 16133 [Dépêches originales adressées à la Cour par divers ambassadeurs et agents français en
Espagne II], online since October 2015) reveals that in 1609 the same secretary Descartes acted as interim
ambassador in Spain, whereas Joachim Descartes was in France at the time. Ergo, more than one person
went by the name Descartes in the early seventeenth century, and this knowledge puts another “discovery”
by Cook into perspective: the presence of a marine captain named “Descart” on a list of soldiers active
during the siege of La Rochelle (1627). According to Cook, the captain is likely René Descartes (pp. xi,
164, 166, 168).
Cook also wants us to believe that Descartes begins a well-known passage in his Discours de la méthode
with a military example: “Thus we see that bastions undertaken and completed by a single architect are
usually more attractive and better planned.” “Bâtiments” is usually translated as “buildings”; but according
to Cook (pp. 84, 245 n 32), the literal (seventeenth-century) meaning is “bastions”—which is nonsense.
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The questions Cook raises in his preface regarding Descartes’s early life and how and why he started to
write philosophy—assuming that he did not enter adulthood with the decision to change philosophy and
science fundamentally—are important, intriguing, and justified. Any attempt to answer these questions
must rely on speculative reasoning to some extent, and when done right the debate on the conclusions
reached can be valuable and interesting. This is not the case, however, when much of the (indirect) ev-
idence taken as the starting point for such speculations is too easily credited as true and reliable, without
being at least partially substantiated by hard facts.

Erik-Jan Bos

Erik-Jan Bos is a historian of philosophy at Radboud University, Nijmegen, who specializes in Descartes and
Cartesianism. With Theo Verbeek and Roger Ariew, he is working on a complete historical-critical edition,
with English translation, of Descartes’s correspondence.

Alberto A. Martínez. Burned Alive: Giordano Bruno, Galileo, and the Inquisition.
348 pp., bibl., index. London: Reaktion Books, 2018. £25 (cloth). ISBN 9781780238968.

Scholars who write on Giordano Bruno usually take care to distinguish between his brilliant insights and
his wild ideas. They may wince at Alberto Martínez’s willingness to embrace Bruno’s conceptual frame-
work, but they will have to admit that we can all learn from a historian who writes like a fan rather than as
a judge. Martínez not only feels intellectually challenged by Bruno but is genuinely excited by what he
was as a person—and he shares his feelings. This empathy leads him to what more staid historians would
perhaps consider a lack of critical sense. This has to be said to potential readers, but not without adding
that they will find Burned Alive more stimulating if they make allowances for the author’s radical stance,
which is clearly stated in his introduction. “Historians,” he writes, “say that Giordano Bruno was not con-
demned for his beliefs about astronomy or cosmology—unlike Galileo.” After this crucial assertion, Mar-
tínez adds: “This book shows, despite all expectations, that Giordano Bruno really was burned alive for his
beliefs about the universe. Bruno argued that the earth has a soul and that many worlds exist. However,
historians didn’t know that those beliefs were considered heresies, that is, crimes against God, punishable
by death” (pp. 7–8).
The quest for the reasons underlying the trial and condemnation of Galileo in 1633 is one of the lon-
gest lived, and most intriguing, themes in the history of science. Martínez has gathered all the evidence
that can be found for arguing that thoughtful men in the early seventeenth century perceived striking sim-
ilarities between Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei. This led them to confuse the identities and unique-
ness of the two men, with the result that Galileo was tainted with the same brush as Bruno.
Bruno was imprisoned in Venice in 1592 for holding heretical views; the next year he was sent to
Rome, where he was incarcerated until his execution. According to historians—who are familiar with her-
esies, despite Martínez’s indictment—most of the charges brought against Bruno during his eight-year im-
prisonment were based on his philosophy, his theology, and his political views. The Inquisitors were not
much concerned with the question of the Copernican universe, although Bruno attempted to emphasize
that his book The Ash Wednesday Supper, which he had published in England, really did have the Co-
pernican theory as its object. Unfortunately, the original record of the trial was destroyed in the nineteenth
century. The scanty material that has survived indicates that his interlocutors were especially suspicious of
Bruno’s flattering remarks about Elizabeth, the English queen, and Henry III, the French king. From
these two monarchs Bruno expected the reunion of Catholic and Protestant confessions after the papacy
had come to its senses. The pope did not take kindly to this idea.