The Poetics of Nothing: Jean Passerat’s ‘De Nihilo’ and its Legacy

On 1 January 1582 the poet and scholar Jean Passerat (1534–1602) sent a gift to his patron Henri de Mesmes: a poem in Latin hexameters about nothing (“De nihilo”). It became a literary sensation, prompting, over the next decades, a long and varied sequence of poetic and prose responses in Latin and vernacular languages by various authors competing to out-do Passerat, and one another, in ingenuity. Why did this poem catch the imagination of so many as the sixteenth century turned into the seventeenth? This article offers the first complete account of the ‘Nothing’ phenomenon, as it passed between multiple languages, literary genres and cultural contexts. It traces its dissemination via networks linked to institutions of learning, to academies and salons, to patrons and to coteries of poets. Focusing on the French context in particular, it then goes on to argue that the literary and political significance of these texts is greater than has hitherto been recognized.

White 240 erudition and the republic of letters 5 (2020) 237 -273 This essay offers the first complete account of those texts that were directly inspired by Passerat's poem. I measure the sheer scale of this phenomenon, which spanned multiple languages and literary genres. I trace its dissemination via networks linked to institutions of learning, to academies and salons, to patrons and to coteries of poets,. As the conceit circulated within and between these networks, passing freely between different spheres of learned and literary culture and crossing linguistic and confessional boundaries, it sparked explosions of creativity in diverse genres and fields of learning (poetry, philosophy, science), and formed sequences of dialogue and debate (the poetic contest, the learned disputation, the political polemic). What mattered was not the central idea itself-which was nothing, or almost nothing-but the ways in which the expression of the paradox was formulated and reformulated differently by different communities of readers and writers. In the final part of the essay, focusing on the French context, I offer a closer reading of some of the poetic texts, and argue that their literary and political significance is greater than has hitherto been recognized.

In Praise of Nothing
Passerat's poem relies for its effect on a series of equivocations between the pronominal and substantive senses of 'nothing' , or rather between its potential to signify both a negative (no-thing) and a positive concept (Nothing): 'Nothing is more precious than jewels or gold'; 'The Gods fear Nothing'; and so on. Most of the poems written in response to Passerat's 'Nihil' play an essentially similar linguistic game, juggling with indefinite, negative, and impersonal pronouns and occluding, or equivocating between, their antecedents or referents. The game of equivocation takes on a different cast as the conceit passes from one language to another. One of Passerat's French translators in a brief note6 pinpoints the difference in grammatical negation between French and Latin that makes translation impossible, namely that French usually requires two negative particles, which tends to minimize ambiguities. It goes unremarked that there is another aspect of Latin grammar that makes it more amenable to these equivocations: the use of the verb 'esse' to mean both 'is' and 'there is' . Philippe Girard's 'Quelque chose' , which on first reading appears to be an imitation of 6 Rien. A Henry De Mesmes pour Estraine. Traduict du Latin de Iean Passerat, en françois. Quelque Chose. Tout (Paris: Etienne Prévosteau, n.d.). One contemporary reader was not at all convinced by the attempt, and jotted in the margin of one copy of this edition: 'ce rien traduict du latin en bon francois ne vaut rien' . The copy is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (RES-YE-2004); a digitized version can be found at <https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k722473>.
Passerat's poem that completely misses the point of it, a perverse transformation of a paradox into a banality, is in fact an accommodation of the conceit to a form more suited to the French language-which, in turn, led to the proliferation of Latin poems on 'Aliquid' , since the first such poem, by 'P.G.P.' of Moulins in 1597, is in part a translation into Latin from Girard's French. Passerat was by no means the first to have written a poem playing on the ambiguity of 'Nothing' . The Occitan poet Guillaume de Poitiers (Guillaume ix d' Aquitaine, 1071-1127) had composed a riddle poem about nothing ('Farai un vers de dreyt nien'). There are several parodic sermons on 'Nihil' and 'Nemo' dating from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, including the centonic 'Sermo de nihilo' .7 The rhétoriqueur poets of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century were enamoured of such poetic games: Mellin de Saint-Gelais (c.1491-1558), for example, wrote more than one short poem in this vein.8 'Rien' featured as a character in popular literature, as for example in the early sixteenth-century Farce joyeuse et récréative à trois personnages, à sçavoir: Tout,Chascun et Rien.9 In Italian, there was Francesco Coppetta's (1509-1553) burlesque 'Capitolo di noncovelle ' (c.1553).10 The cognate 'Nemo' tradition had a still richer history.11 These previous treatments of the 'Nothing' conceit are, though, less relevant for an understanding of Passerat's poem than is the general Renaissance phenomenon of the paradoxical encomium.12 Widely practised by humanists 7 Martha Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages: the Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor, 1996), 164-7. 8 Merken Ibid., and see Bowen, 'Nothing' , 60-1, for some other examples from farce and popular literature, as well as an overview of examples from Rabelais (61-3). See also Jan Miernowski, Signes dissimilaires: la quête des noms divins dans la poésie française de la Renaissance (Geneva, 1997), 114-119, on Clément Marot's incorporation of the carnivalesque 'Monsieur Rien' into his poetic discourse. 10 Carlo Ossola, ed. Le antiche memorie del nulla (Rome, 1997), xi. 11 See Bayless, Parody, 57-86, on the parody sermons; Jelle Koopmans and Paul Verhuyck, Sermon joyeux et truanderie: Villon, Nemo, Ulespiègle (Amsterdam, 1987) for the 'tradition néminique médiévale' , including sixteenth-century print adaptations of the material; Hannes Fricke, 'Niemand wird lesen, was ich hier schreibe': Über den Niemand in der Literatur (Göttingen, 1998) for a broad overview from Radulphus through to the twentieth century, with particular attention to German and English 'nobodies ' . 12 Of the vast literature on the Renaissance paradox, I cite here some key works that treat material relevant to the subject of the present article. Still important is Rosalie Colie's Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton NJ, 1966), esp. 219-51 on the 'problem of Nothing' and 224-5 on Passerat. Also of general relevance are A. E. Malloch, 'The Techniques and Function of the Renaissance Paradox' , Studies in Philology, 53 (1956), 191-203 rhetorically trained in epideictic speech-making and argument in utramque partem, the best known examples of the form-Erasmus's Folly, Ulrich von Hutten's 'Nemo' , Panurge's praise of debt in Rabelais, Berni's praise of the plague, Pirkheimer's praise of gout-are the tip of the iceberg, as can be seen from a glance at the massive compendium of paradoxical encomia by ancient and humanist authors compiled by Caspar Dornavius (Caspar Dornau, 1577-1632. The two-volume Amphitheatrum sapientiae Socraticae joco-seriae (Hanau, 1619) collects over 500 pieces, mostly in Latin, ranging from short poems to longer prose works, including eight on 'Nihil' , three on 'Aliquid' , seven on 'Omnia' , six on 'Nemo' , and four on 'Parvi' , many of them direct responses to Passerat's 'Nihil' . The compilation concludes (where else?) in More's Utopia. Even in the context of the crowded market for games of this type, Passerat's 'Nihil' sparked an explosion of interest among readers who found his treatment to be uniquely witty, elegant, and philosophical-indeed, made it into a foundational text for a new revival of the conceit.

The Responses to Passerat's 'Nihil': An Overview13
The earliest poetic responses to Passerat's 'Nihil' date from well before its first known print publication (1587): clearly the poem circulated widely in manuscript, and perhaps also in print, before that date. Indeed, its first translation appeared even before the notional date of the poem's presentation to Henri de Mesmes (1 January 1582), in the form of Marie de Romieu's (c.1545Romieu's (c. -c.1590 Passerat's 'Nihil' , simply inverts the central idea: Nothing, from being the best has become the worst, for Nothing is worse than x, y and z. Around the same time, numerous responses by French poets, in both Latin and French, were starting to circulate: they began to appear in print from 1586-7, and they form a kind of sequence, or ever-expanding poetic contest, since they respond to and name one another as well as Passerat's poem. Many of them were later collected in a 1597 compilation by the Paris printer Etienne Prévosteau (who had also previously printed several of the texts in the sequence in separate editions) and in an edition printed at Caen by the widow of Jacques Le Bas (1596).17 The 1596/7 editions omit most of the names of the authors of the poems-only Passerat andTheodorus Marcilius (Derick Marcelisz, 1548-1617),18 the Latin poets, are named, and the third Latin poet, author of 'Aliquid' , is designated 'P. G. P. Molinensis'-so that the poems tend to be misattributed in the modern criticism. But there are some clues to authorship within the poems that refer to one another in the sequence, and in some of the separately printed editions of individual poems. The author of 'Si peu que rien' knew the identity of the authors of 'Quelque chose' , 'Tout' , and 'Le moyen' , designating them 'un Vandomois' , 'Des Prez' , and 'un gentil Auvergnac' respectively. An earlier edition of 'Quelque chose' (Paris: Prévosteau, 1587) names its author as 'Philippes Girard Vandomois' .19 'Le moyen' had appeared in a much 16 'ΑΠΟΘΕΩΣΙΣ ΚΑΙ ΟΥΔΕΝΩΣΙΣ Νoviveteris Cornucopiae Nihili Utopiensis, Strenae loco inter amicos mutuo missae per internuncium Mercurium Liberalem Patricium Beneventanum' , dated October 1583, Neustadt an der Weinstraße; printed in Molnár's 1614 compilation (Lusus poetici excellentium aliquot ingeniorum, mirifice exhibentes Neminem, Nihil, Aliquid, Omnia (Hanau, 1614), 29-40), and later included in Dornavius's Amphitheatrum.

17
The title page of the Caen edition closely resembles that of Prévosteau's compilation (with the omission of 'Aliquid'), but the text itself differs, so this is not a falsely dated reprint of Prévosteau 1597 (as might be assumed from the fact that it was Prévosteau who had originally printed several of the poems  Guesle (1557Guesle ( -1612.20 The 1596/7 compilations collect the poems roughly in order of their first appearance in print. Passerat's Latin 'Nihil' seems to have been printed for the first time in 1587, in the Prévosteau edition that also contained Girard's 'Quelque chose' .21 Theodorus Marcilius's 'Lusus de nemine' had been printed by Denis Du Pré in 1583, and then in a revised version in 1586, the first version having been composed without knowledge of Passerat's poem, the second repurposed as a response to it. Des Prez's 'Tout' had appeared (anonymously) in a 1587 Paris edition printed by Guillaume Auvray. The second French translation of Passerat's 'Nihil' (which differs completely from that of Marie de Romieu) is possibly also from around 1587: Prévosteau collected it with 'Quelque chose' and 'Tout' in an undated edition often bound together with the 1597 compilation, and there is also an undated Lyon edition printed by Benoist Rigaud. 'Le moyen' by the Auvergne poet (probably Jacques de La Guesle) had been printed in 1588, but the version we have in the 1596 and 1597 compilations has been drastically reduced in length, from 816 to 244 lines. 'Aliquid' by the author from Moulins seems to have no edition earlier than 1597.22 I have found no editions of 'Si peu que rien' , 'On' and 'Il' before 1596, but they had certainly been circulating before then, even if only among a small coterie of poets, since they refer to one another. Another poem belonging to this sequence but not collected in the 1596 and 1597 compilations, Jacques de Fonteny's 'Personne' , had appeared in a 1587 edition printed by Pierre Hury. Fonteny mentions Passerat and the 'Quelque chose' and 'Tout' poems, and he lards his poem with some unacknowledged borrowings from Marcilius's 'Nemo' . R Passerat's poem inspired numerous other texts by French authors not included in the 1597 compilation. In 1594 there appeared Jean Demons's (1567Demons's ( -1604 bizarre Demonstration de la quatrieme partie de rien, which is presented as a response to 'Rien' , 'Quelque chose' , and 'Tout' , and which promises to provide the solution to ending the religious conflict by distilling the 'quintessence tiree du quart de rien' by the magical invocation of divine names. This text had been printed by Prévosteau, but he did not include it in the 1597 compilation, for reasons that will become apparent-although the author of 'Si peu que rien' possibly obliquely refers to it. In 1599 Prévosteau also printed 'Le Bonjour' by one 'R. de B.' , which is a direct continuation of the sequence collected in 1597, and which stands as the clearest illustration of the game's adoption into salon culture. Théodore de Bèze (1519-1605) included Passerat's poem in his own 1597 Epigrammata, and wrote an epigram in response to it.23 I also mention here a lengthy French heptasyllabic poem 'Rien' by Claude Du Verdier, son of the famous bibliographer, which was published in 1585 by his father, who had found it among his papers. Doubtless many more poems of this nature, loosely inspired by Passerat's 'Nihil' or by the craze it initiated, were produced than survive.
Our next point of reference is in the vicinity of Nuremberg in 1605, where a student of the law professor Konrad Rittershausen (1560Rittershausen ( -1613 at the University of Altdorf, Johann von Blansdorf of Dresden, dedicated to him a Latin strena on 'Omnia' , an 'Everything' to answer Passerat's 'Nothing' .24 This sparked a flurry of poetic exchanges in Latin, including some mind-bending acrostic trickery, between Rittershausen, Theodorus Sizmannus, Georgius Remus, Paulus Chemnitius, and Albert Szenczi Molnár (1574Molnár ( -1634, the Hungarian who 23 Bèze, Poemata varia (Geneva, 1597), 195-198 'De nihili antiquitate' to 'No-one' rather than to his prospective patron; but he could presumably be confident that Moritz would see the joke. Johann Balthasar Schupp (1610Schupp ( -1661, a professor of the University of Marburg, produced in 1639 a satirical Latin prose strena in praise of 'Nihil' , the much reprinted Xenium, sive de usu et praestantia Nihili. It was printed together with Passerat's 'Nihil' and von Hutten's 'Nemo' in a Jena edition of 1694. There followed other public orations given in German universities in the manner of Götz's 'Diputatio de nihilo' . Jacobus Musselius of Anklam presented his 'Oratio de nihilo' at the University of Wittenberg on 10 October 1624, printed as Quinta essentia de Nihilo prolata & demonstrata in oratione publica (Wittenberg, 1624). In response, a student at the University of Leipzig, Benedictus Mauricius of Altdorf, in February 1628 gave an oration in praise of 'Aliquid' , stating explicitly that he had taken his cue from Musselius's Wittenberg oration (sig. A3v). Both orations were printed together with Passerat's 'Nihil' (and Köler's 'Aliquid') in a 1628 Leipzig edition. Another locus of Passerat-inspired activity was Prague. It centered on Johannes Matthäus Wackher von Wackenfels (1550-1619), whose liking for Passerat's poem is attested by Johannes Kepler; Wackher, who had been a dedicatee of Remus's 'Omnia' in 1605, and for whom Szenczi Molnár would make the 1614 compilation, received from Christoph Köler (1602-1658)-formerly of the University of Altdorf-an 'Aliquid' composed at Prague as a direct response to Passerat.26 Wackher was himself exercised by Marcilius's 'Nemo' to the extent that he wrote a different ending for it; this was presumably because Marcilius had made such a mess of the praise of his patron (the statesman Pomponne de Bellièvre) at the end of the poem.27 Franz Guillimann (1568Guillimann ( -1612, a professor at Freiburg, wrote yet another 'Aliquid' , printed in a 1611 Freiburg im Breisgau edition together with Passerat's poem and Marcilius's 'Lusus de nemine' . Another mock treatise on the subject of Nothing, the Asserta veritas genuina Nihili by the Antwerp clergyman Franciscus Lichtius (François de Licht, 1605-1673) appeared in print in 1642, and had a second expanded edition in 1647.
The trend for discorsi on Nothing in the Italian Academies of the 1630s-a dispute conducted with particular intensity in the Venetian Accademia degli incogniti in 1634-represents a somewhat separate development: a libertine and sceptical exploration of the 'Nothing' phenomenon. The years 1632-1635 saw the production of a series of such texts, by Giuseppe Castiglione, Luigi Manzini, Marin Dall' Angelo, Raimondo Vidal, Jacques Gaffarel, and Giovanni Villa. Since these texts have no direct connection with Passerat's poem, and given that they have already been the subject of a recent study by Carlo Ossola, which furnishes ample background on the Italian Academic contexts from which they emerged, I will not deal with them in the present article.28 Similarly, the presence of 'Nothing' and 'Nobody' in Spanish baroque poetry, which again represents a development largely distinct from the Passerat-inspired trend, has been recently studied by Rodrigo Cacho Casal.29 Most of the poems so far mentioned are strenae/étrennes offered to patrons or prospective patrons, following the model of Passerat's dedication to Henri de Mesmes.30 The 'nothing' conceit, if handled adroitly, was easily assimilable with the rhetoric of modesty and self-abnegation that was essential to dedicatory epistles and poems.31 At the same time, they are responses to one another in the spirit of aemulatio, cumulative additions to an ever-expanding poetic contest. The exchange of strenae functions not just as an opportunity for advancement by patronage, but also as a means of forging and consolidating group identities.
An appreciation of this aspect of the strena form itself is essential to an understanding of the mechanics of the entire 'Nihil' phenomenon. It is no coincidence that Theodorus Marcilius, poet of one of the most frequently reprinted responses to Passerat, the 'Lusus de nemine' , was also the author of a history of strenae (Historia strenarum, 1596), a work published by none other than Etienne Prévosteau. In a fine example of imitative harmony he couched his Historia strenarum-which is itself offered as a strena-in the form of a debate: the conceit of the whole work is that its four sections are the competing performances of four 'adolescentes' . In them Marcilius presents, both in playful verse (showing the taste for wordplay that marks his 'Nemo') and in learned prose orationes steeped in rhetorical argument in utramque partem, the case for and against the practice of strenae. The first 'oratio' , citing patristic writers and 28 In addition to the Italian texts, Ossola, Le antiche memorie, also includes text and Canon Law in support, argues that strenae are a depraved and absurd pagan ritual practiced by the Romans and irreconcilable with good Christian conduct. The defence essentially argues that many pagan rites and beliefs survive in language in name only, having no practical connection with modern practices; and that strenae are a joyful expression of friendship, compatible with the Christian principle of mutual generosity, rather than a cynical transaction. The whole concludes with a poem in hexameters asserting that Christ must take precedence over Janus. That Marcilius adopted the form of a debate for his history of strenae is significant. The strena form is bound up with the idea of mutual exchange and transactions in the patronage economy, but it is also associated with friendly competition, and with the dialectical method, the progressive and communal acquisition of knowledge. Thus Marcilius's Historia strenarum provides some suggestive parallels to the functioning of these poems. We have already seen how the poetic game originating with Passerat easily moved into the domain of the (parodic) university disputatio.32 The responses and developments of the theme collected in the 1597 Prévosteau compilation frequently adopt the conceit of a contest between the competing constituencies of 'nothing' , 'something' , and so on, presenting themselves as striving to reach resolution through poetic dialogue. Since the pronouns on which the game hinges are also the titles of the poems, the poems themselves become part of the discourse of equivocation, thus bringing into play self-referential and intertextual reflections on the emulative and collaborative dimension of the poetic process itself (composition, reception, response).

3
The Poetics of 'Nothing' But I would contend that the poem and the responses to it are worth taking seriously as poetry. Other criticisms have been motivated by the notion that Passerat's poem and its offshoots speak of a kind of fin-de-siècle decadence in the face of exhaustion of creative possibilities.36 While this is true to a certain extent-and the poems themselves often make a self-conscious play of itthese poems in fact constitute serious reflections on poetic creation. The poetic game inaugurated by Passerat's 'Nihil' brings into focus a set of issues fundamental to the Renaissance poetics of imitation. The game takes as its starting point the reduction of poetic composition nearly to a degree-zero, to minima, to almost nothing. These are stylistic exercises: style is all; all is in the artistry of verba, with res reduced to nothing or almost nothing. Dornavius highlighted precisely this point in the heading of his adoxographical compilation: 'in which subjects, held to be either valueless or pernicious, are defended and extolled by means of the advocacy of style' ('quibus res, aut pro vilibus vulgo aut damnosis habitae, styli patrocinio vindicantur, exornantur'). This is the essence of paradoxical writing, which, as Malloch astutely observes, consists entirely in its form of words, and cannot be paraphrased as there is no underlying argument.37 But from this reduction to almost nothing, this process of distillation-alchemy is an important reference point in many of these texts-there emerges something; in fact, something proliferates and multiplies, generates a copia that gains in force as the sequence of poems accumulates, forming an elaborate structure of cross-reference and intertextuality. 35 The printer of the 1623 compilation Argumentorum ludicrorum et amoenitatum scriptores varii commended study of Passerat's 'Nihil' and Marcilius's 'Nemo' particularly to students of law: 'si de Iure pronuncias, de Nemine ac Nihilo versus examina. Mirum enim, quam in fori litibus arrideat status inficialis, dum vel a Nemine factum, vel nihil factum esse constanter asseveratur' ('If you are a student of Law, examine the verses on No-one and Nothing. For it is amazing how in court the status inficialis makes a mockery of trials, stubbornly asserting that the deed was done by no-one, or else that nothing was done'). The 'status inficialis' ('position of denial') was a method of defence in forensic rhetoric. The author of these words perhaps also had in mind Passerat's satirical poem on the divinity of lawsuits, the 'Divinité des Procès' (1598 The claim to be venturing out on untrodden paths is itself a poetic commonplace. Indeed, Passerat highlights the fact that the impulse to innovate is compelled by the fact that the ancients have already said everything, and nothing is left to say (a variation on the oft-repeated Terentian saying 'nihil dictum quod non dictum prius'): Res ea narratur quae nulli audita priorum, Ausonii et Graii dixerunt caetera vates: Ausoniae indictum NIHIL est Graiaeque Camoenae. (p. 1) What is being related here has never been heard by anyone before: the Latin and Greek poets have said all the rest: NOTHING has been left unsaid by the Latin and Greek Muses.
The situation that motivates the composition of 'Nihil' , then, is that there is both nothing-a mind empty of inspiration-and too much-a mind replete with the already said. The poet's starting point is to evacuate poetic discourse of its content, to empty out the storehouse of tradition in order to find the 'nothing' that is left; but the poet goes on to compose a text that makes a virtue of its intertextual plenitude, its absolute reliance upon other texts for its meanings. (These poetic games rely in no small part on the reframing of the proverbial, the commonplace, the already said.)38 In Passerat's poem, and in many of the others that followed it, there is a constant tension between a model of pure poetic creation 'from nothing' , and the reality of a text constructed from the materials of tradition; a tension, indeed, which is present in the very word inventio, which encompasses both models of creation. This tension carries through into the other poems in the sequence, which make efforts to replicate Passerat's conceit of pure innovation, but at the same time draw attention to their position as moves in an intertextual game. 'Quelque chose' , 'Tout' , 'Le moyen' , 'Si peu que rien' , 'On' , 'Il' and 'Le Bon-jour' , each reference the previous poems in the sequence, each new poem adding one more term to the sequence and asserting that it encompasses all of the previous ones. Jean-Claude Margolin, assuming that Philippe Girard was the author of all three of the poems 'Rien' , 'Quelque chose' and 'Tout' , thought that the composition of this triad represented Girard's attempt to render Passerat's poem into French, otherwise impossible by straightforward translation.39 Although mistaken in this assumption, Margolin affords an important insight: the sequence of poems responding to Passerat should be read as a dialectical development of Passerat's theme. There is an accumulation of meaning as these poems reference and integrate into their conceit the previous poems in the sequence, a sequence composed of internally warring elements but held together by its central conceit-by the internal force of style, as it were.
The imitative procedure of the poems that first respond to Passerat's 'Nihil'-'Quelque chose' , and 'Aliquid' (which in part translates the former)is that of verbal rearrangement and recasting. Presenting themselves as the diametrical opposite ('opposé contraire') of Passerat's poem, they function as a sort of verbal mirror image, taking up Passerat's conceits, and inverting and amplifying them: replacing a 'nothing' with a 'something' . Significantly, Girard and the 'Aliquid' poet invert Passerat's complaint that the Latin and Greek poets said everything: however much the ancients said, they argue, there is always something left to say, since (as I would gloss the point) imitative reframing creates new meaning. The something that is left is the meaning generated from allusion and intertextuality. The proof is in Passerat's poem itself, whose 38 Cf. Terence Cave's observation that the paradox is 'the negative alter ego of the commonplace': 'Thinking Believe me, Nihil is already taking over your dominion, and says that that poem [i.e. Marcilius's first version of the 'Lusus de nemine'] had been scavenged in its wake, and speaks of nothing but its prior claim.
In claiming priority for his own poem (and in taking a swipe at Passerat, whose Nihil is said by Nemo to be 'that most timid of things' that 'taunts with empty speech') Marcilius is claiming too much, since Nemo had already a long history:42 indeed, Marcilius hits upon many of the same conceits-playing on proverbial, biblical, and classical commonplaces containing the word 'nemo'already taken up by von Hutten in his 'Nemo' , although he appears not to have known it. However, despite what Bayless says about it,43 the subject of Marcilius's poem is not the St. Nemo of the medieval sermons: it is a humanist production through and through, and his material is impeccably classical. Indeed, Marcilius's poem makes great play of Nemo's pedigree and ancestrya pedigree which is, emphatically, a classical literary one: Marcilius tells us, his ancestor is Homer's 'OUTIS' , the Odyssean 'No-man' . Accordingly Marcilius's poem, more than any other in the sequence, is saturated in imitatio and allusive play with classical sources. That is what I said: and this was the response, nem. con.: 'Are you afraid of that most timorous of things, Nothing, and its empty taunts? Why not also fear gnats, and dandelion fluff, or tremble at your own shadow?' Marcilius weaves classical references into Nemo's speech: an allusion to Virgil's Culex is probably meant (and by extension, encompassing the long tradition of paradoxical encomia of small and worthless things-for such texts on culices and umbrae, see Dornavius), but the echo of Lucretius ('pappos volantes')from a passage where 'culices' also appear (De rerum natura 3.381-393)-extends the intertextual game, since Lucretius had also been a key reference point for Passerat's 'Nihil' .44 The poet, embarrassed by the harangue, is spurred on to ensure that his own 'Nemo' will defeat Passerat's 'Nihil' in war. His language is borrowed from classical epic. He echoes the extended opening of the Aeneid ('at nunc horrentia Martis / arma virumque cano'): 'postmodo bella canam atque horrentia NEMINIS arma' (p. 4). He combines this with an allusion to Lucan's Pharsalia 1.1, relocating the civil war to 'Utopian fields' . This is exemplary of the imitative method of these poems: it evacuates the discourse of its content, making the subjects of Lucan's poem no-one and nothing, its setting a no-place: No-one sleeps when awake, and is awake in sleep, is silent when speaking and can speak when silent. No-one knows not what he knows: such is his silence. No-one can relate things both true and false at the same time.
Probably Marcilius had in mind here the Muses at the start of Hesiod's Theogony, who 'know how to speak many false things similar to / equivalent to true ones' ('ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα'). Marcilius thus makes his 'Nemo' into the source of all poetic authority, and asserts, against Passerat, his superior command of classical learning, and his greater artistry and invention. Marcilius's Latin intervention is based on a model of individual authorship and creativity quite different from that of the vernacular salon poems. Most of the poems in the French sequence were published anonymously. For the wider reception of the sequence of poems, the identity of the contributors (with the exception of Passerat, who is usually mentioned by name as the originator) mattered less than the connection to a shared set of reference points. The poems presented themselves as discrete interventions in an ever-expanding contest; but they could also be read-in the compilations that collected them together-as belonging to a textual continuum, detached from individual authorship and held together by the complex web of cross-reference and allusion. At the same time, the poets wished to be known and recognized by those 45 The point of this formulation eludes me. Legend had it that Plautus had worked in a mill. in the know-hence the games and equivocations with their names-and to stake a claim as members of a community. As we shall see in the next section, the ties that bound this community together were as much political as they were literary. The 'Nothing' discovered by Passerat's Muse generated a potentially infinite proliferation of words. Margolin, apparently unaware of the other poems and responses in the sequence, observed that 'on pourrait parfaitement imaginer une suite, et même une suite indéfinie, où RIEN, QUELQUE CHOSE et TOUT continueraient de rivaliser en subtilité' ('one might easily imagine a sequence, even an infinite sequence, in which 'Rien' , 'Quelque chose' and 'Tout' would keep striving to outdo one another in subtlety'). He was right to imagine such a thing. The next poem in the sequence, 'Le moyen' , published in the following year, extended the domaine de la lutte if not quite ad infinitum, then certainly ad nauseam (it ran to 816 lines). By the time the 'Si peu que rien' poet added his contribution, there was already a sense of the game being exhausted ('Et quelqu'un me dira: Vous venez à haute heure / Pour glaner en ce champ. Perte à qui trop demeure' (Someone will tell me: You're arriving too late to glean this field. First come, first served, p. 1)); but the end of the sequence was still a long way off. To be sure, the participants in the game were sharply aware of the risk of being caught up in an infinite and ultimately meaningless proliferation: Ne vois tu pas que Rien, que Quelque chose, et Tout, Sont trois infinitez sans principe et sans bout?
('Le moyen' , p. 7) Do you not see that Nothing, Something and All are three infinities without beginning and end?
The poet of 'Le moyen' recognized that the game depended on the unbounded signification of those pronouns. Accordingly his poem (in the shortened version at least), rather than competing on the level of the conceit itself, reduces the play with pronouns largely to a commentary on the reception of the previous poems. Instead of a descent into an abyss of meaninglessness, the infinite proliferation of the discourse can thus be figured as a 'harmonie' , precisely what wins for the poets a 'gloire infinie': 'Que ces infinitez, a leur triple Harmonie, / Ont iustement acquis une gloire infinie' (That these infinities, from their threefold harmony, have deservedly won infinite renown, p. 7). A characteristic feature of these compositions is the extensive deployment of inexpressibility topoi, and figures of adynaton (impossibility). Passerat uses the familiar poetic shorthand for innumerability, a comparison to grains of sand in the Libyan desert, a topos that is taken up again in the 'Lusus de nemine' ,

257
The Poetics Of Nothing: Jean Passerat's 'de Nihilo' And Its Legacy erudition and the republic of letters 5 (2020) 237-273 'Le moyen' , and others. 'Aliquid' uses the 'many mouths' topos, ('linguae licet, oraque centum, / Sit vel ferrea vox'-'even if I had a hundred tongues and mouths, / or a voice of iron…' , p. 2), protesting the inadequacy of the poet to repay his patrons' largesse, or do justice to the vastness of his theme. The use of topoi-formulations unmoored from specific textual reference points and so deprived of the possibility of a meaningful allusive relation-risks descent into empty cliché. But as Stephen Hinds showed, the deployment of this very 'many mouths' topos in ancient poetry could involve more complex intertextual articulations.46 Likewise here we may read the topos not as mere poetic cliché but as productive of a meaningful allusive relationship. The Virgilian verses on which the 'Aliquid' poet models his phrasing (Aen. 6.625-7; Geo. 2.43-4) are themselves already rearticulations of a venerable tradition stretching back to Homer. The presence of this topos in 'Aliquid' thus brings a supplementary metapoetic meaning. Passerat's poetic game had started from the position that the ancients made every word a cliché, leaving nothing for the modern poet to say. But as the 'many mouths' topos indicates, the trope of incompleteness was already built into ancient poetic tradition from the very start: thus it cannot be case that the ancients said everything. The poet's incomplete capacity to express is shown to be not a function of his being a 'late' poet of a decadent age, but a feature of classical literary expression. Moreover, the fact that this has been said already-the fact of its being a topos-does not limit the capacity of the new poet's rearticulation to make new meanings. It is precisely by virtue of the poet's ability to make meaning by speaking again words spoken so many times already that he may indeed speak with a hundredfold voice.

The Theology of 'Nothing'
The incommensurability and ineffability of these subjects, far from limiting and circumscribing the possibility of expression, is precisely what gives rise to their proliferation. Bovelles. 49 We have already noted that Passerat's 'Nihil' would end up being aligned with this tradition of thought, in the commentary of Schoock. Although Schoock's commentary is largely taken up with spurious parallels and the ostentation of irrelevant erudition, its final section is a philosophical reflection on the problem of creation ex nihilo, dealt with more fully in Chapter 12 of his Tractatus. Schoock is guided in this by his reading of Théodore de Bèze's epigram on Passerat's 'Nihil' , a poem which merits our close attention: Pace mihi liceat, Sapientes, dicere vestra, Qui factum ex nihilo dicitis esse nihil, En qui vos verbis, qui vos ratione refellat, Et quiddam faciat quod fuit ante nihil. Quiddam (inquam) ex nihilo faciat, quo credere quidquam Grandius, aut etiam fingere velle, nefas. Immo, quod mirum magis est, qui misceat una Sic alicui nihilum, sic aliquid nihilo, Ut confirmet idem simul esse, aliquidque nihilque, Et neutrum esse probet, quod sit utrumque tamen. Mirus homo, Nihil esse aliquid statuensve negansve, Quodque negat statuens, quod statuitque negans.50 By your leave, allow me to say, you wise men who say that Nothing was made from Nothing, here is a man who refutes you with words and with reason, and makes what was Nothing before into Something. Something, I say, he makes from Nothing, greater than which it is wrong to believe or even imagine anything. Nay, even more extraordinary, a man who mingles together Nothing with Something, Something with Nothing, such that he demonstrates Something and Nothing to be both the same, and proves to be neither what is nevertheless both. Extraordinary fellow! Both asserting and denying that Nothing is Something; both proposing what he denies, and denying what he has proposed.
The epigram, with its parodic use of scholastic language, appears to make a mockery of ontological and metaphysical speculation. For Bèze, divine creation ex nihilo is essentially incomprehensible, a matter of faith not reason.51 Passerat's poem is to be read as exposing the inanity of such speculations. The final lines of the epigram mimic that descent into obscurity and meaninglessness. This is not, however, mere mockery: Bèze is also expressing a genuine admiration for Passerat's achievement in creating something from nothing, and in elaborating such a perfectly balanced paradox, suspended harmoniously between mutually exclusive propositions. Passerat's achievement was not a philosophical but a poetic one. Earlier humanist poetic theorists had explored the analogy between divine creation ex nihilo and poetic creation. Lorenzo Valla's discussion of the words 'poeta' (Elegantiae 4.32) was a key reference point: Valla cited the words of the Nicene Creed which calls God 'ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς' ('maker [poieten] of Heaven and Earth'). Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462-1535) elaborated the connection more fully:52 in his Silvae morales (1492), he aligned the poet with the divine creator because poets, like God, create ex nihilo. In his Terence praenotamenta (1502) he took the analogy further, asserting that poets have in common with God the creator the ability to harmonize contraria.53 These ideas still resonate at the end of the sixteenth century, and even have their after-echo in the 1661 commentary of Schoock. It was precisely these aspects of Passerat's poetic achievement that Bèze's epigram highlighted: to have created something from nothing and in so doing to transcend the dialectic of 'something' and 'nothing' . His 'Nihil' captured the fundamental essence of poetic creation. 52 Felipe González Vega, '"De poetica theologica": presencias de alegorismo platónico en la exégesis humanista y una mediación de las 'Siluae Morales' de Badio Ascencio (1492) Badius, 'Praenotamenta' , in P. Terentii aphri … Comedie (Lyon, 1511), sig. aiiiir: 'Poets, therefore, often imitate God inasmuch as they not only embellish real material but sometimes imagine it entirely, just as God does not only create through nature (like being born from like), but also created the primary matter of all things ex nihilo; for which reason in Greek the 'maker of heaven and earth' and a maker of poems is designated by the same word, i.e. poeta […] Likewise just as God made all that He created harmonize and fit together in a certain proportion, even though many things are in conflict with one another, so that despite the generation and corruption of particular things the universe nevertheless remains unified in its being; so too the poet creates his composition as a unity even though it is composed of diverse material.'

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The Politics of 'Nothing'
The particular strain of adoxography deriving from Passerat's 'Nihil' lent itself very readily to moral and social satire: 'nothing is sacred these days…' , and so on. The 'Nihil' conceit did not have quite as strong an association with satire as did the cognate 'Nemo' tradition, which had a rich history running from the medieval sermons through to Ulrich von Hutten's revised 'Nemo' (1515-18) and beyond. Indeed, the elements of satire in Passerat's original are few, and handled with a light touch. But some of his later imitators would be much more heavy-handed, to the extent that their productions shade into propaganda and pamphleteering.
Most of the French poets participating in the game make more or less extended reference to the current religious conflicts; indeed, one could read them as a kind of ongoing commentary on that period of the Wars of Religion known as the 'guerre des trois Henris' (1585-1589), followed by the accession and conversion of Henri iv, and the conclusion of the conflict with the Edict of Nantes (1598). If Janus the two-faced god appropriately presides over the paradoxist, and Janus the tutelary deity of the New Year appropriately presides over the giver of strenae, the Janus whose temple at Rome stayed open in wartime also appropriately presides over these poems, written in a period of transition from a time of war to a time of peace. Girard, indeed, made that link explicit: 'QUELQUE CHOSE pourroit […] nous donner la paix, / La paix tant desiree, et clorre, pour jamais / De Ianus Clusien la guerriere chapelle' ('SOMETHING might bring us peace, / Longed-for peace, and close forever / The temple of war of Janus Clusius' , p. 17).
The political affiliations of the French poets who responded to Passerat, and their patrons, were predominantly to the 'politique' faction (moderate, Catholic, royalist). The association is in one sense unsurprising, since Passerat himself was a 'politique' royalist-later he would contribute to the Satyre Menippée-and his patron Henri de Mesmes, also a moderate, had negotiated the treaty of Saint-Germain in 1572. The dedicatee of Theodorus Marcilius's 'Nemo' (1583) was the prominent statesman and diplomat under Henri iii, Pomponne de Bellièvre (1529-1607).54 Pierre de L'Estoille (1546-1611),55 dedicatee of Fonteny's 'Personne' (1587), was a 'politique' , and the poem itself is very much in support of Henri iii: Fonteny writes of his plan to undertake a greater work in praise of Henri, and celebrates other poet-courtiers of Henri such as 54 On whom see Olivier Poncet, Duperron. The most overtly political poem in the sequence is Jacques de La Guesle's 'Le moyen' (1588 version; the later edition excises much of the political content). La Guesle dedicated it to Achille de Harlay (1536-1616); both poet and dedicatee were active in the 'politique' faction of the Paris Parlement, of which Harlay was 'premier président' .56 'On' (before 1596) is an étrenne for another prominent 'politique' , 'De Chaste' (Aymar de Clermont-Chaste, d.1603); but it is as a whole a rather incoherent performance, oscillating uneasily between joking encomium ('on' is responsible for all good in the world) and more satirical mode ('on' is responsible for discord and conflict and the evil that men do). 'Il' (before 1596) is dedicated to Gaspard Pelet de La Vérune (d.1598), another royalist, and to his ally 'Du Pont' (probably Étienne de Bonpar, sieur du Pont); the poem itself, framed as an étrenne, takes the form of a lament for the ravages of the wars. The 'Aliquid' poet, the Moulins professor 'P.G.P.'-probably writing around 1597 and so after the conversion of Henri iv-appended to his version a lengthy praise of Henri iv and the Bourbons (Moulins was the capital of the Bourbonnais province). The intensification, then pacification, of the poetic conflict might even parallel political developments, and the metaphor of the emulative relation between the poems as a battle or all-out warfare could very easily shade into the poets' references to the Wars of Religion. The participants in the poetic contest that grew up around Passerat's 'Nihil' easily adopted the metaphor of poetic warfare. Marcilius, rewriting his 'Nemo' in 1586 used the language of epic war to frame his intervention as a battle to the death between his 'Nemo' and Passerat's 'Nihil' , a new 'war worse than civil' from which 'Nemo' would emerge victorious. Girard, and the Latin poet of 'Aliquid' after him, presented their subject as the deadly enemy ('l'ennemy capital'/'lethifer hostis') of the 'Nihil' of Passerat. But as the sequence continued, the poets adopted more conciliatory language. The point of the contest was no longer to vanquish the foe, but to find a language that could encompass and contain the dispute and provide resolution to the conflict. Thus for the poet of 'Le moyen' , the scenario the poem plays out ('the mean' being the 'resolution' of the dispute between, 'nothing' , 'something' , etc.) is designed to evoke the ideal logic of the disputation (proposition -antithesis -resolution). 'Le moyen' resolves the contest, and even encompasses all of the previous efforts, which would never have come into being in the first place without 'le moyen' . The 'Si peu que rien' poet (in a genealogy reminiscent of Ronsard's Discours des misères de ce temps, where 'Dame Presomption' gave birth to 'Opinion') makes 'si peu que rien' father to the 'affreux Demon qu'on appelle Duel' , the discord sown among the people of The Poetics Of Nothing: Jean Passerat's 'de Nihilo' And Its Legacy erudition and the republic of letters 5 (2020) 237 -273 France. The conflict itself arose from 'almost nothing' , but 'almost nothing' could also resolve it. 'On' moves further away from the confrontational language that characterized the early stages of the poetic contest: instead the poem is posited as a defence of the previous ones, which are under attack from critics: Please forgive this speech if IT dares to join you. IT is no equal to NOTH-ING, IT judges itself less than NOBODY, IT is aware of SOMETHING greater, IT knows that ALL has been said. IT observes that conversation is abuzz with THE MEAN that IT can by no means follow, while IT notices another living on ALMOST NOTHING. IT knows that ONE has said so much, and so well, that the ancients, the ancient Roman fathers could not have said it better.
As the poem develops, it becomes clear that this will not be the anticipated play of equivocations on the pronoun 'it' , but a lament for the annihilation of meaning in an age of civil war ('Il te dit que ce siecle est un siecle insensé') that has profoundly disrupted the social and moral order ('IL a brouillé tout ordre'). It culminates in a prayer to God to restore order and meaning ('Qu'IL recouvre le sens avecques ta faveur'). In framing the poem as a deferential rather than adversarial intervention in the sequence, the 'IL' poet aligns this bid for peace and the restoration of order with a bid for peace in the poetic contest: his poem sweeps away the game of equivocations and obfuscations, and tries to put an end to that meaningless proliferation of poetic conceits.
'Le Bon-jour' (1599), the first of the poems in the sequence to have been written after the Edict of Nantes, celebrates the 'bon jour' that marks the end of war and the advent of peace ('Mais BON-IOUR […] nous a donné en France une Paix generalle'), just as the same 'bon jour' caps and encompasses the entire poetic contest: ONE can by any MEANS do NOTHING good in this world, without a GOOD-DAY to favour ALL the undertaking. A GOOD-DAY is worth more therefore than ONE and ALMOST NOTHING, a GOOD-DAY gives ALL its existence and its MEANS.
Thus the progress of the poetic contest itself parallels political developments, the intensification then resolution of the civil wars.
In the poems collected in 1596-1597, the parallel between the topsy-turvy logic of the game initiated by Passerat and the disorder of the wars is an implicit, if persistent, one. But an earlier text had made the connection much more explicit; indeed, had presented itself as an attempt to bring about an end to the conflict and a restoration of the moral and social order precisely by applying the extravagant logic of the paradoxical encomium to political realities. This was the promised to 'transform and convert the things that are considered most harmful and abominable into good and beneficial ones' , a formulation evocative of the procedures of adoxography,58 but here in fact referring to the author's claim to be able to solve the religious conflict and 'cure the haemorrhages, wounds, tumours and venereal ulcers of France' .59 Demons's idea is to take the adoxographical logic of Passerat and his imitators literally, shifting its frame of reference from rhetoric to natural magic: this would not be a mere game with words, but an attempt to alter reality by conjuring with divine and demonic names. Demons positioned his text as a fourth sequel to Passerat's 'Nihil' , which would complete and outdo the 'trio' of 'Rien' , 'Quelque chose' and 'Tout' (he was clearly unaware of the other poems in the sequence that had already appeared before 1594, and also unaware of the names of the poets except Passerat).60 In fact, he claims to be adding the fourth, fifth, and sixth instalments, since the 'quintessence' and 'sextessence' would follow the 'quatrieme partie' . In the controversy over which is more praiseworthy, 'nothing' , 'something' or 'all' , Demons claims to have found the answer: it is the name of God. He views the poetic sequence at first (in the Demonstration de la quatriesme partie) in terms of the metaphor of musical harmony, and then (in the Quintessence and Sextessence) as a process of alchemical distillation, the result of which would be nothing less than the solution to ending the religious conflict.
Thus the dialectic of the poetic exchange is transmuted into alchemy, and the wordplay characteristic of the paradoxical encomium into a magic conjuring with divine and demonic names. But the occult practices expounded in the poem-Demons's main source is Cornelius Agrippa-are given a different emphasis in the commentary, which rejects them as dangerous fictions, treating them instead as metaphors. As Miernowski argues, the work thus ends up being essentially a 'political allegory' for France's situation. Again this process of allegorization is understood by Demons precisely in terms of the 58 Cf. Dornavius's characterization of the adoxographical pieces collected in his Amphitheatrum: 'quibus res, aut pro vilibus vulgo aut damnosis habitae, styli patrocinio vindicantur, exornantur' ('in which subjects, held to be either valueless or pernicious, are defended and extolled by means of the advocacy of style'  Demons, 1594, 8-10. 'Therefore in order to understand the demonstration of the fourth part of NOTHING, SOMETHING and ALL (which are the terms of the enigma), the reader should know that Passerat, a man of singular learning and Royal Reader at the University of Paris, along with two others who did not wish to be named, composed and sang a musical trio, which is to say three poems […].' White 266 erudition and the republic of letters 5 (2020) 237-273 logic of the paradoxical encomium: he sees his text as operating 'a metamorphosis of magical traditions, or a conversion of the most detestable of things into good' ('une metamorphose des traditions magiques, cest a dire, des choses plus detestables en bonnes' , 1595 dedication to Henri iv, 11). As Passerat's game expanded beyond France, it also crossed confessional boundaries relatively easily. It seems to have been particularly enjoyed in Calvinist circles: in the Collegium Casimirianum, and with Molnár, Aemilius Portus, and the circle around Moritz of Hesse-Kassel, although not generally for overtly political purposes-the 'De Nihili antiquitate et multiplici potestate' (1609) of Aemilius Portus being the exception. Further evidence for its popularity among Calvinists comes from the album of the Dutch humanist Johan Radermacher the Elder (Johannes Rotarius, 1538-1617), which includes an anonymous poem 'Nihil' written as a strena to one 'Aulus' . The poem, clearly modelled on that of Passerat, consists of 17 elegiac couplets beginning 'Vis tibi Januariis donem de more Kalendis / Munus; habe mirumque insolitumque: NIHIL.' (You want me to give you a gift for the first of January? Please accept one that is wonderful and out of the ordinary: NOTHING').61 The popularity of the game among Calvinists may have been in part a result of the endorsement of Passerat's poem by Théodore de Bèze himself:62 as we have seen, Bèze included it in his own Poemata of 1597, along with a commendatory epigram. Bèze's opponents seized upon this endorsement as a way to attack him. For example, two epigrams printed under the heading ΑΔΗΛΟΝ (i.e., anonymous) in the 1623 compilation Argumentorum ludicrorum et amoenitatum scriptores varii (111)(112) were clearly written by one of Bèze's many adversaries. The epigrams force Passerat's game into the domain of dangerous theological polemic.
Against the principles of the old authorities, you falsely claim, in giving nothing, to be giving an excellent gift, and so mingle the profane with the sacred, the sacred with the profane, something with nothing, nothing with something, that you conclude that nothing is something, and something nothing […] Ah! Beware when making something from nothing, nothing from something, lest what you want to be something, become nothing.
So you value as nothing the oracles of divine scripture; so you value as nothing the true dogmas of wisdom? With you as guide all will go, the laws of nature thrown into confusion, and revert, with you as guide, back to chaos.
[…] Since your worthless verses raise nothing to the heavens, I shall think nothing of your verses written about nothing.

The Science of 'Nothing'
It is tempting, at this point in the discussion, to pose the question of why these 'nothings' proliferated at this particular historical moment. Although the 'nothing' conceit had a previous history, and would be periodically revived in later centuries-most famously in English by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (c.1678), and in French by Louis Coquelet de Péronne (1730)63-its heyday was undeniably in the decades around the turn of seventeenth century.

63
Coquelet de Péronne wrote two prose encomia, 'L'Éloge de Rien' (1730) and 'L'Éloge de Quelque chose' (1730). Coquelet promised to include Passerat's 'Nihil' in the first printed edition of his 'Éloge de Rien' , but reneged on the promise when it went to press, having decided-he claimed-that it would be of minimal interest to his target audience. More likely he wished to exclude anything that might undermine his claim to originality, or that might make his own work suffer from comparison. Mercier de Compiègne did include White 268 erudition and the republic of letters 5 (2020) 237-273 One answer might come by connecting the phenomenon with the climate of sceptical thought that was so influential, particularly in France, at this time. Certainly the competing poets perceived some links between their game of verbal equivocation and the stakes of philosophical scepticism: for example, answering Passerat's point that Socrates knew nothing, Girard (and the Latin poet of 'Aliquid' who translates this part of Girard's poem) retorted that Socrates knew something: the fact that he knew nothing. However, a deeper and more extended engagement with sceptical ideas is absent from these texts, setting them apart in style and philosophical motivation from the more overtly libertine engagements that emerged from the Italian academies of the 1630s.
To develop our answer more fully we might easily extend our speculations into the realms of visual art, of mathematics, of science, or even of economics. One might, for example, make connections with the very current problem of the void, culminating, of course, in Pascal's experimental proof of the existence of the vacuum in nature-and his reflections on nothingness in moral and theological terms in the Pensées. 64 Alternatively, one might attempt to follow Brian Rotman's extravagant efforts to discover the epistemic isomorphism uniting the introduction of zero in arithmetic, the vanishing point in visual art, and imaginary money in the economy.65 Such loose speculations are unlikely to shed much light on the literary phenomenon associated with Passerat's 'Nihil' .
Instead, I want to conclude by looking at a scientific text that was directly connected with the phenomenon that grew up around Passerat's poem. Among the texts compiled by Dornavius in 1619 was one by Johannes Kepler. This beautiful short work, De nive sexangula ('On the six-cornered snowflake'), was offered as a strena in 1611 to Johannes Matthäus Wackher von Wackenfels-a patron I have already mentioned. Kepler, punning on the word 'nix' ('snow' in Latin, 'nothing' in colloquial German), begins his treatise thus: Cum non sim nescius, quam Tu ames Nihil, non quidem ob precii vilitatem, sed proper lascivi Passeris lusum argutissimum simul et venustissimum: facile mihi est coniicere, tanto tibi gratius et acceptius fore munus, quanto id Nihilo vicinius.
Since I know how fond you are of Nothing, not for its low value, but because of the game of that cheeky Sparrow which is both most witty and most delightful, it is easy for me to guess that the closer a gift comes to Nothing, the more welcome and acceptable it will be to you.
Kepler then describes how he found the appropriate subject, a 'Nothing' that could lend itself to a similar sort witty and delightful treatment ('what is next to Nothing, but lends itself to sharpness of wit'), as he crossed the Charles Bridge in Prague and observed snowflakes settling on his coat. The translator of the Oxford Clarendon edition (1966; repr. 2014), puzzled by the obscure 'sparrow' reference, despaired of finding the explanation for this 'private joke' . 66 The reference is, of course, to Jean Passerat, as is obvious to those who read the text in Dornavius's compilation, where it follows on shortly from the other texts in the sequence inspired by his poem; and as we have seen, Christoph Köler made the same punning reference to Passerat in his 'Aliquid' , also dedicated to Wackher.
Kepler frames his scientific endeavour in the same terms as the poetic games that had so delighted his patron: it was a product of the exercise of wit, motivated by nothing more than a whim, a gift to be received in a spirit of fun. Such ideas inform not just the rhetorical framing of the work: they also form part of the explanatory logic of Kepler's treatise. In attempting to answer the question of why snowflakes take on their specific hexagonal form, Kepler's efforts to propose a mathematical explanation ultimately give way to the Aristotelian notion of a formative faculty (facultas formatrix); and he resorts to the familiar early modern idea of the joke of nature, lusus naturae. 67 The playful and aleatory character of the poetic game started by Passerat, motivated by nothing more than the accumulation of conceit and ornament, inheres also in the formative faculty of nature itself: