The Age of Subtlety: Nature and Rhetorical Conceits in Early Modern Europe by Javier Patiño Loira (review)

Abstract

The Age of SubTleTy is guided by the fundamental question, “How do the operations of conceits relate to nature’s operations?” (184), and by the key premise that the early modern conceit ( conceptus , concetto , concepto ) took shape in tandem with contemporary shifts in scientific sensibilities. In developing his analysis, Patiño Loira remaps a galaxy of astronomers, mathematicians, natural philosophers, polymaths, rhetoricians, and poets in Europe, mainly from Italy and Spain, during the first half of the seventeenth century and shows how they invented conceits within their own fields of study. Patiño Loira thus writes alongside scholars such as Lorraine Daston, Alexander Marr, Juan Pimentel, and José Ramón Marcaida (all cited in the bibliography) who work at the intersection of arts and sciences. At the same time he distinguishes his book through a vast knowledge of rhetoric, grounded in Baltasar Gracián’s Arte de ingenio (1642) and Emanuele Tesauro’s Il cannocchiale aristotelico (1670), and through an intimate understanding of figurative language in all its versatility. The introduction,