Naudé, Gabriel

Abstract

Gabriel Naudé was a French physician, librarian, and natural philosopher whose reputation today rests on three pillars. Naudé’s early work in systematizing librarianship continues to interest historians of libraries. His relentlessly skeptical scientific and political rationalism and his combined fondness for preserving the state and for the thought of Machiavelli are still cited by historians of thought and of politics. Finally, his association with the group of freethinkers led by Pierre Gassendi, a group criticized by René Pintard for what he called their “libertinage érudit” (Pintard, Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle, 2 vols. Paris, 1943), makes of Naudé an important figure in the history of religious dissidence in the early modern era. These three domains are by no means arbitrary: as Damien (Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 82(2):18–23, 2006) and others have emphasized, Naudé’s thoughts in all three areas were developing at a time when the intellectual edifice of classical and medieval thought systems – from Aristotle and Pliny to Thomas Aquinas – and of the Christian religion was increasingly being questioned. It was no accident that Naudé, a precocious and brilliant student, should have been attracted to the rational systematization of human knowledge and to the construction of thought systems that could persuasively lay claim to occupying the epistemological space vacated by those classical and medieval predecessors. In a polemical climate in which many French authors, the poet Théophile de Viau being perhaps the best-known example, came under attack from conservative thinkers, it was perhaps inevitable that Naudé himself, after his death, should become the target of the Capucin polemicist Jacques de Chevanes (Autun. 1671. [pseud. of Jacques de Chevanes]. L’Incrédulité sçavante et la crédulité ignorante, au sujet des magiciens et des sorciers, avecque la response à un livre intitulé: “Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont esté faussement soupçonnés de magie”. Lyon: par le P. Jacques d’Autun).