1 For example, E. Selinger and R. Crease (eds.), The Philosophy of Expertise, New York, 2006; and M. Lynch, ‘Circumscribing expertise: membership categories in courtroom testimony’, in States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order (ed. S. Jasanoff ), London and New York, 2004, 161–80.

2 See J. Nicot, Thresor de la langue française, Paris, 1606, 271.

3 Nicot, op. cit. (2), 271.

4 Dictionnaire de L'Académie française, 1st edn, Paris, 1694, 58. Thus Sir Richard Barckley's 1598 Discourse of the felicitie of man qualifies certain men as ‘artificiall apes’ who counterfeit ‘a formall kinde of strangers civilite’. R. Barckley, Discourse of the felicitie of man, London, 1598, 327.

5 R. Estienne, Dictionarium latinogallicum, Paris, 1552 (published originally in 1538), 508.

6 Estienne, op. cit. (5), 118.

7 See R. Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (facsimile of the first edn, London, 1611), Columbia, SC, 1968, np. 419.

8 Cotgrave, op. cit. (7), 804, 841.

9 Cotgrave, op. cit. (7), 841.

10 Estienne, op. cit. (5), 118.

11 Cotgrave, op. cit. (7), 419.

12 P. Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution, Chicago, 1995, 20–1.

13 Quoted in Dear, op. cit. (12), 22, from Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (ed. J. Barnes), Princeton, 1984, I. 31. See also P. Dear, ‘Mysteries of state, mysteries of nature: authority, knowledge and expertise in the seventeenth century’, in States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order (ed. S. Jasanoff ), London and New York, 2004, 206–24, esp. 207–9.

14 As Nicot, op. cit. (2), 416, put it: ‘Dressé et fait ou habitué à faire grande monstre de soy.’

15 ‘Il n'a pas beaucoup hanté les escolles’, from the 1531 prologue of ‘Table des Œuvres de Jean Parmentier’ by Pierre Crignon; see Jean Parmentier, Oeuvres poetiques (ed. F. Ferrand), Geneva, 1971, 3.

16 M. Mollat, Le Commerce maritime normand à la fin du Moyen Age: Etude d'histoire économique et sociale, Paris, 1952, 535–8. Also see E. Guénin, Ango et ses pilotes d'après des documents inédits, tirés des archives de France, de Portugal et d'Espagne, Paris, 1901.

17 See, for example, Guénin, op. cit. (16), 20–1.

18 P. du Val, Le Puy de souverain amour, facsimile edn introduced by P. LeVerdier, Rouen, 1920, originally published 1543, fol. A iv(v).

19 Bibliothèque nationale (hereafter BN), Ms. Fr. 379, fol. 10(r).

20 BN, Ms. Fr. 379, fol. 28(r-v).

21 In a similar chant written earlier in the sixteenth century, Nicolle Osment compares the Virgin to a ‘sphere showing all the secrets of the heavens’. See P. Vidoue, Palinodz, chants royaulx, ballades, rondeaulx, et epigrammes, a lhonneur de limmaculee Conception de la toute belle mere de dieu Marie Patronne de Normans presentez au puy a Rouen … sl, 1525. Reprinted by E. deRobillard de Beaurepaire, Rouen, 1897, fols. xxiv–xxv.

22 I would like to thank Hélène Mialet for help and advice in translating this poem. See Jean Parmentier, Oeuvres poetiques, op. cit. (15), 62–5; the poem can also be found in D. Hüe, Petite anthologie palinodique (1486–1550), Paris, 2002, 171–4; also see BN, Ms. Fr. 1739, fol. 99. This poem was not signed, but is attributed to Parmentier by Ferrand. Denis Hüe has since definitively established that it was by Parmentier's navigator, Pierre Crignon. Hüe, D., ‘Un nouveau Manuscrit palinodique, Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine n° 385’, in Le Moyen Français (1995), 35–6, 175–230Google Scholar; for a contemporary account of the astrolabe see J. Focard, Paraphrase de l'astrolabe, Lyon, 1544.

23 See J. A. Bennett, The Divided Circle: A History of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation and Surveying, Oxford, 1987, 14–16; and A. Turner, Early Scientific Instruments: Europe 1400–1800, London, 1987, 11–16; for the planispheric astrolabe and its workings see H. S. Saunders, All the Astrolabes, Oxford, 1984.

24 See A. Stimson, The Mariner's Astrolabe: A Survey of Known Surviving Sea Astrolabes, Utrecht, 1988; D. Waters, The Sea or Mariner's Astrolabe, Coimbra, 1966; Bennett, op. cit. (23), 33–4; Turner, op. cit. (23), 65–8; G. Beaujouan and E. Poulle, ‘Les Origines de la navigation astronomique au XIVe et XVe siècles’, in Le Navire et l'économie maritime du XVe aux XVIIIe siècles (ed. M. Mollat and O. de Prat), Paris, 1957, 112–13. There are very few surviving mariner's astrolabes. In the Oxford Museum for the History of Science, for example, which has the largest collection of astrolabes in the world, there is only one mariner's astrolabe.

25 See J. Law, ‘On the methods of long-distance control: vessels, navigation and the Portuguese route to India’, in Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? Sociological Review Monograph (ed. J. Law), London, 1986, 234–63.

26 As Thomas Blundeville notes in His Exercises, containing sixe Treatises … which Treatises are verie necessarie to be read and learned of all yoong Gentlemen that … are desirous to haue knowledge as well in Cosmographie, Astronomie, and Geographie, as also in the Arte of Nauigation, etc., London, 1594: ‘Broade astrolabes, though they be thereby the truer, yet for that they are subject to the force of the winde, and thereby ever moving & unstable, are nothing meet to take the altitude of anything, and especially upon the sea; which this to avoid the spaniards doe commonly make their Astrolabes or Rings narrow and waightie, which for the most part are not much above five inches broade, and yet doe waigh at least foure pound, and to that end the lower part is made a great deale thicker than the upper part towards the ring or handle. Notwithstanding most of our English Pilots that bee skilful doe make their Sea Astrolabes or rings sixe or seven inches broade, and therewith very massive and heavie, not easie to be moved with everie wind.’ Regarding these difficulties, see Bennett, op. cit. (23), 34; and Howse, D., ‘Navigation and astronomy’, Renaissance and Modern Studies (1986), 30, 62–3Google Scholar.

27 See Le Discours de la navigation de Jean et Raoul Parmentier de Dieppe, attributed to Pierre Crignon (ed. M. Ch. Schefer), Paris, 1883.

28 BN, Ms. Fr. 1537 fol. 96(v)–97(v); Jean Parmentier, Oeuvres poetiques, op. cit. (15), 25.

29 See, for example, Neal, K., ‘The rhetoric of utility: avoiding occult associations for mathematics through profitability and pleasure’, History of Science (1999), 37, 151–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Natalie Zemon Davis makes a similar point regarding commercial arithmetic: ‘honorable association for business was not conceived in terms of the fruits of commerce and finance. Rather business lost its stigma because business arithmetic was allegedly a liberal art and somehow related to the discovery of “great secrets and high mysteries”’. Davis, N. Zemon, ‘Sixteenth-century arithmetics on the business life’, Journal of the History of Ideas (1960), 21, 18–48, 29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 See E. H. Ash, Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England, Baltimore, 2004, 89.

32 Waters, op. cit. (24), 16. This is not to say that there was not resistance amongst Spanish pilots to the introduction of mathematical techniques of navigation; see A. Sandman, ‘Mirroring the world: sea charts, navigation, and territorial claims in sixteenth-century Spain’, in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (ed. P. H. Smith and P. Findlen), New York, 2002, 83–108.

33 Ash, op. cit. (31), 139.

34 See Ash, op. cit. (31), for example 96, 103, 139. Not coincidentally, the development of new navigational techniques was paralleled by the development of new commercial techniques of maritime insurance and underwriting. Indeed, not long after Crignon produced his chant praising the many virtues of the astrolabe, the first book published in France on maritime insurance, the Guidon, stile et usance des marchands qui mettent a la mer, was published in Rouen; see Mollat, op. cit. (16), 393; and L. A. Boiteux, La Fortune de mer. Le Besoin de securité et les débuts de l'assurance maritime, Paris, 1968.

35 See, for example, Vigarié, A. C., ‘France and the great maritime discoveries – opportunities for a new ocean geopolicy’, Geo-Journal (1992), 26, 477–81.Google Scholar

36 See M. Wintroub, A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity and Knowledge in Early Modern France, Stanford, 2006, esp. Chapter 2; on the importance of this trade see also M. Mollat, Histoire de Rouen, Toulouse, 1979, 154; idem, ‘Anciens Voyages Normands au Brésil’, Bulletin de la Société de l'histoire de Normandie, Rouen, 1887–90, V, 236–9; idem, op. cit. (16), 249–67; E. Gosselin, Documents authentiques et inédits pour servir à l'histoire de la Marine Normande, Rouen, 1876, 142–71; and Desmont, M., ‘Le Port de Rouen et son commerce avec l'Amérique’, Société Normand de géographie (1911), XXXIII, 404–10.Google Scholar

37 See Mollat, op. cit. (16), 257.

38 See, for example, F. Joukovsky, La Gloire dans la poésie française au XVI^e siècle, Geneva, 1969.

39 It is important to note that whereas Aristotle might have distinguished between rhetoric, grammar and poetry, the tendency of sixteenth-century humanists was to conflate them. See, for example, E. Rummel, The Humanist–Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation, Harvard Historical Studies 120, Cambridge and London, 1995; and P. Kristeller, ‘The modern system of the arts’, in idem, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts, New York, 1965, 163–227.

40 See, for example, M. Wintroub, op. cit. (36); T. Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France, Ithaca, NY, 2001; W. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization, Ann Arbor, MI, 1995; and B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, London and New York, 1983, esp. 37–46.

41 This honour was also claimed by Lyon. Regarding the Puy de palinod, see Wintroub, op. cit. (36), esp. 64–90; D. Hüe, La Poésie palinodique à Rouen (1486–1550), Paris, 2002; G. Gros, Le Poète, la Vièrge et le prince du Puy: Etude sur la poésie mariale en milieu de cour aux XIV^e et XV^e siècles, Paris, 1992; Newcomer, C. B., ‘The Puy at Rouen’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (March 1916), 31, NS, 24, 211–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; E. de Robillard de Beaurepaire, Les Puys de Palinod de Rouen et de Caen, Caen, 1907; G. Lebas, Les Palinods et les poètes dieppois, Dieppe, 1904.

42 Bibliothèque Municipale de Rouen, Ms. 1063 (Y. 16), fols. 1–2.

43 Wintroub, op. cit. (36), 69.

44 BN, Ms. Fr. 1715, fol. 1(v)–2(r).

45 P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge, MA, 1984; idem, ‘Le Langage autorisé: Note sur les conditions sociales de l'efficacité du discours rituel’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (1975), 5/6, 183–90; idem, ‘Social space and the genesis of groups’, Theory and Society (1985), 14, 723–44; idem, ‘Social space and symbolic power’, Sociological Theory (1989), 7, 14–25. Also see G. Gadoffre, La Révolution culturelle dans la France des humanistes, Geneva, 1997.

46 P. Fabri, Le Grant et vray art de pleine rethorique: util: proffitable et necessaire a toutes gens qui desirent a bien elegantement parler et escripre … Par lequel ung chuscun en le lysant pourra facillement et aornement composer et faire toutes descriptions en prose: come oraisons: lettres missives: epistres: sermons recitz: collations et requestes, Rouen, 1534; also published in facsimile with an introduction by A. Héron, 2 vols., Rouen, 1890, i, 15. See also T. Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism, Cambridge, 1997, 55–6.

47 Fabri, op. cit. (46), 9.

48 Fabri, op. cit. (46), 7.

49 Fabri, op. cit. (46), 13.

50 The measure of their success can perhaps be gauged by François I's 1539 edict of Villers-Cotterêts, which stipulated that French be the official language of the courts and in the administration of justice throughout the land.

51 Something that was clearly a priority, as Crignon's journal of Parmentier's voyage to Sumatra indicates: ‘un matin, notre capitaine se delibera de l'aller voir, et mena seulement avec luy Nicolas Bout, le truchement, et moy’. Parmentier asked them if they knew how ‘Dieu avoit envoyé son Verbe divin se faire chair en terre et s'incarner en une vierge par l'operation du Saint-Esprit: et comment ce Verbe, que est le fils, est engendré du Pere, ainsi que la parole est engendrée au coeur et en la pensée de l'homme; et que le Saint-Espirt procede du Pere et du Fils, qui est l'amour des deux. Notre truchement dit qu'il ne sçavoit dire cela. Il luy demanda s'il avoit our parler de Jesus et de la Vierge marie, il dit que ouy: et pour ce que le truchement ne pouvoit bien parler de ces choses, le propos fut changé.’ See Le Discours de la navigation, op. cit. (27), 70.

52 See Jean Parmentier, Oeuvres poetiques, op. cit. (15), 46–8.

53 Jean Parmentier, Oeuvres poetiques, op. cit. (15), 64, see also 27–9, 40–1, 46–8.

54 In this sense, Crignon's poetic astrolabe is perhaps similar to Charles de Bovelles's polyhedra; see Sanders, P. M., ‘Charles de Bovelles's Treatise on the Regular Polyhedra (Paris, 1511)’, Annals of Science (1984), 41, 513–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Jean Parmentier, Oeuvres poetiques, op. cit. (15), 65.

56 J. Blagrave, The Mathematical Ievvel: shewing the making, and most excellent vse of a singuler instrument so called: in that it performeth with wonderfull dexteritie, whatsoeuer is to be done, either by quadrant, ship, circle, cylinder, ring, dyall, horoscope, astrolabe, sphere, globe, or any such like heretofore deuised: … The vse of which iewel, is so aboundant and ample, that it leadeth any man practising thereon, the direct pathway … through the whole artes of astronomy, cosmography, … and briefely of whatsoeuer concerneth the globe or sphere …, London, 1585.

57 See Ash, op. cit. (31), 90.

58 Hoffman, B. G., ‘Account of a Voyage Conducted in 1529 to the New World, Africa, Madagascar, and Sumatra, Translated from the Italian, with Notes and Comments’, Ethnohistory (1963), 10, 1–31, 33–79, 11–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar (from an account by ‘a great French sea captain from Dieppe’ published by Ramusio in the third volume of his collection Navigationi et Viaggi, and generally attributed to Crignon). Crignon's reference to other ‘subtle’ means of finding longitude unknown to many is surely a reference to his own treatise, Perle de Cosmographie, 1534, now lost, that purported to have found a solution (through magnetic variation) of the problem of determining longitude at sea.

59 Le Discours de la navigation, op. cit. (27), 19.

60 Le Discours de la navigation, op. cit. (27), 23.

61 Le Discours de la navigation, op. cit. (27), 24.

62 BN, Ms. Fr. 379 fol 20(r-v)–21(r). I would like to thank Margot Wagner for her help and advice in translating this poem.

63 Fear of epistemic derogation did not correlate chronologically with social derogation. To a certain extent it pre-dated it. Aristotelian strictures against metabasis found an analogue in the policing of disciplinary boundaries at precisely the time these boundaries were becoming more porous, for example from the fifteenth century with the incursion of humanist philology onto grounds jealously guarded by university-trained theologians. On the other hand, concern grew regarding noble derogation during a slightly later period, from the end of the sixteenth century, when the nobility were being assailed from below by wealthy merchants and robe officials entering their ranks. On derogation and mathematics in early modern Italy see Biagioli, M., ‘The social status of Italian mathematicians, 1450–1600’, History of Science (1989), 27, 41–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More generally, regarding derogation in early modern France, see, for example, G. Brunelle, ‘Narrowing horizons: commerce and derogation in Normandy’, in Society and Institutions in Early Modern France (ed. M. Holt), Athens, GA, 1991, 63–79; E. Dravasa, ‘Vivre noblement’: Recherche sur la dérogeance de noblesse du XIV^e au XVI^e siècles, Bordeaux, 1965; Zeller, G., ‘Une Notion de caractère historico-sociale: La Dérogeance’, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie (1957), NS, 22, 40–74Google Scholar.

64 BN, Ms. Fr. 379, fol 29(r)–30(v). Ferrand, in Jean Parmentier, Oeuvres poetiques, op. cit. (15), p. li, attributes this chant to Parmentier. But its placement in a series of chants royaux in BN, Ms. Fr. 379 by Crignon strongly suggests that this poem was authored by Crignon. It is so attributed in J. Nothnagle's collection of Crignon's works, Pierre Crignon: Poète en prose et en vers, Birmingham, AL, 1990, 81.

65 See, of course, N. Elias, Power and Civility, New York, 1982.

66 On Normandy's merchants see Mollat, op. cit. (16); and, for a slightly later period, G. Brunell, The New World Merchants of Rouen, 1559–1630, Kirksville, MO, 1991.

67 In 1542 the Sorbonne explicitly prohibited treatises of grammar, rhetoric, logic or lettres humaines from referring to Christian doctrine; see F. Higman, Censorship and the Sorbonne: A Bibliographical Study of Books in French Censured by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris, 1520–1551, Geneva, 1979, 50 and 52 n. 18. While it might be argued that the mixing of disciplinary genres such as poetry and mathematics violated the Aristotelian stricture against metabasis, from the fifteenth century there was a steady erosion of the lines demarcating these disciplines. Indeed, the skills, competencies and local cultures associated with the status mobility of new professional classes were deeply implicated in the blurring of and in translations across the frontiers between different sorts of knowledge claim. See Westman, R., ‘The astronomer's role in the sixteenth century: a preliminary study’, History of Science (1980), 18, 105–47, 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and especially A. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, Princeton, 1986, 36–7, 303–7.

68 Orontii Finei Delphinatis, Liberalium disciplinarum Professoris Regii, Protomathesis …, Paris, 1532, fol. AA 2(r)–AA2(v), Ai (r), quoted in Davis, op. cit. (30), 30. Such a claim could be made by Finé, who was a reader at the Collège Royale, precisely because he was dependent for his professional identity not on the University of Paris but on the patronage of the king. The hierarchy of the disciplines at the University clearly distinguished between such menial mathematical pursuits and true knowledge; trespass across disciplines was strictly forbidden. However, at court, as Biagioli (see his Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism, Chicago, 1993) has shown for a later period, there was room to navigate across these divides. The career of Lefèvre d'Etaples was a case in point. The princely court was not the only vehicle for such discipline-bending activity, however; the court of Normandy's Puys provided similar opportunities.

69 Crignon's poem was nothing less than an audacious intervention in the well-known controversy over the Virgin's Immaculate Conception by a lowly provincial navigator. As such, his poem was a direct challenge to traditional hierarchies of both knowledge and authority. On the controversies over the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin see E. D. O'Connor (ed.), The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, Notre Dame, 1958.

70 See Nothnagle, J., ‘Two early French voyages to Sumatra’, Sixteenth Century Journal (1988), 19, 97–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar; L. Estancelin, Recherches sur les voyages et découvertes des navigateurs normands en Afrique, dans les Indes orientales et en Amérique, suivies du Journal de voyage de Jean Parmentier de Dieppe à l'Isle de Sumatra, en l'année 1529, Paris, 1832.

71 Jean Parmentier, Oeuvres poetiques, op. cit. (15), 94–5. I would like to thank Hélène Mialet for her help and advice with this translation (my emphasis).