La poésie du ciel in Montaigne's Apologie de Raimond Sebond

Throughout Montaigne's Apologie de Raimond Sebond, which stages a lengthy attack upon human reason's hubristic pretensions to understand our physical and mental universe, the author traces the text's marked penchant for imagery and examples arising from the astronomical and astrological domains. He brands this persistent concern for the fabric of the heavens la poésie du ciel, and he demonstrates how the essayist emphasized the poietic or factitious nature of these human descriptions of the skies. Citations from Latin poetry (Manilius) and from contemporary French verse (Ronsard) function as a central vehicle for the inscription of the paradigmatic poésie du ciel in the Apologie. Progressively, the sun comes to occupy a crucial place in the essay's repeated glances towards the skies. Montaigne's fascination with solar themes is underlined by his reference to Copernicus's 1543 De revolutionibus orbium caelestium. The author discusses Montaigne's view of this treatise as an essentially literary event and as a salient manifestation, among many others, of astronomical poiesis.