Losing Marin Mersenne's Correspondence
In 1665 appeared the first academic journals of Europe, the Journal des sçavants in Paris and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the latter the official journal of the Royal Society, founded in 1660. The French Académie des Sciences was founded shortly after, in 1666.
Before the appearance of academic journals, scholars, in addition to writing and publishing books, wrote extensive letters to each other, and these letters have played a key rôle in the history of science. In the last twenty or so years of his life, Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), a member of the Minim order, was at the center of a vast network of scholars discussing matters of science, mathematics, philosophy and theology. This network grew after Mersenne created the Académie Parisienne in 1635, the precursor to the Académie des Sciences. Among these correspondents were Isaac Beeckman, Pierre Gassendi, René Descartes, Pierre de Fermat, Gilles Roberval, Evangelista Torricelli, Étienne Pascal and his son Blaise Pascal, Constantijn Huygens and his son Christiaan Huygens, and Thomas Hobbes.
According to Alexandre Koyré, Christiaan Huygens disparagingly called Mersenne “the letterbox of the learned world”, while Thomas Hobbes, highly appreciative of the help he had received from Mersenne, called him “the attorney-general of the Republic of Letters”1.
I have spent some time this past week looking at how Isaac Beeckman influenced René Descartes. Koyré, in his essay “The Falling Bodies”2, discusses this question at length, and concludes that Descartes’s ideas are entirely novel, and his own, in Le Monde (The World), written in 1630 and published in 1664. Since then, several historians of science have disagreed with what Koyré wrote. The only way for me, a newcomer to this field, to examine these issues fairly, is to look at the original sources, should these be available.
So what are the relevant sources?
For Descartes, I was able to download the 12 volumes of the Œuvres de Descartes3 from gallica.bnf.fr, the site for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (National Library of France). Along with his published works is an extensive set of correspondence, including with Beeckman and Mersenne.
Isaac Beeckman’s Journal4 is available from www.dbnl.org, the site for the De Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (The Digital Library of Dutch Literature). The Journal had been lost for almost three centuries, and was only discovered in 1905 by Cornelis de Waard.
However, the published correspondence of Marin Mersenne5, consisting of 18 volumes, is simply unavailable to me, living in Bogotá. If one looks at the site for this correspondence, www.cnrseditions.fr/auteur/cornelis-de-waard, one can see the books are out of print. But worse, they are not even available on gallica.bnf.fr, the national library! Nor are they available as PDFs on any of the Internet archive sites. How is it possible that the correspondence of a key player in seventeenth-century debates in France, whose publication was paid for by the French treasury, is not publicly available on a French site?
I will continue examining the relationship between Beeckman and Descartes with the material that I have available.
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Alexandre Koyré. Entretiens sur Descartes, p.169. In Introduction à la lecture de Platon, suivi de Entretiens sur Descartes. Éditions Gallimard, 1962.
Alexandre Koyré. “The Falling Bodies”. In Galileo Studies. Translated from the French by John Mepham. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978.
Charles Adam & Paul Tannery, editors. Œuvres de Descartes. Paris: Léopold Cerf. 12 volumes, 1897-1910.
Cornelis de Waard, editor. Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman 1604-1634. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoft. 4 volumes, 1939-1953.
Cornelis de Waard, René Pintard & Armand Beaulieu, editors. Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, religieux minime. Paris: G. Beauchesne. [puis] Presses universitaires de France. [puis] Éd. du Centre national de la recherche scientifique. 18 volumes, 1933-1988.