Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the history of philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King College London and the LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about Jean Baudin and 16th century natural philosophy with Anne Blair, who is Carl H. Ford's timer professor of history at Harvard University. Hello, Anne.

Hi.

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

We're going to be talking about Jean Baudin, which you can properly pronounce better than I just did.

We covered in the previous episode.

So the audience has already heard me attempting to pronounce his name numerous times.

And you are an expert on him because you wrote a book about his work on natural philosophy, which is called the theater of natural philosophy.

And I was curious if you could start by telling us something about the title like wife theater, obviously, but also why natural philosophy.

So what did they mean with that phrase in that era?

Theater is a lovely metaphorical title, which is part of a cluster of metaphorical titles that people love to use in this period to describe books that tried to encompass a wide scope.

In a way to bring it to your mind, your eyes rapidly.

And so, for example, we call them encyclopedias today, I say.

But that term, although it was coined by Roblet among a few others in the early 16th century, was very rarely used as a title of a book.

Instead, for example, Vincent de Beauvais in the 13th century calls his encyclopedia a mirror, the great mirror of natural philosophy.

So Baudin is a theater.

Others have gardens.

There's the bundle of flowers.

So all these lovely metaphors describing this idea of bringing together all kinds of things for you to see.

But Baudin spins his analogy with a sort of an emphasis on divine providence, right?

He says in his dedicatory epistle, the theater of nature is nothing other than a sort of table of the things created by the immortal God placed before the eyes of everyone.

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