‘Secrets of Industry’ for ‘Common Men’: Charles de Bovelles and Early French Readerships of Technical Print

Abstract

Where Charles de Bovelles has a reputation at all, it is as a highly innovative philosopher in the intellectual mold of Nicolas of Cusa, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, or perhaps Giordano Bruno. But beyond being possessed of a mathematical curiosity and turn of imagination, the Picard canon was also deeply invested in the early sixteenth-century efforts to rework French as a language with a distinctive cultural heritage. He experimented with arithmetical and geometrical theory in French, as well as works on the language itself, such as a collection of French proverbs and a short study of French’s origins, via the ancient Druids, in Greek—like many other such theorists, he composed these theoretical studies of the vernacular in Latin.