Noël-Antoine Pluche
Noël-Antoine Pluche (13 November 1688 – 19 November 1761), known as the abbé Pluche, was a French Roman Catholic priest. He is now known for his Spectacle de la nature, a most popular work of natural history.
Pluche, son of a baker, was born in Reims, in a street now named after him. He became a teacher of rhetoric. The Bishop of Laon made him head of the town's college, a post he accepted to escape judicial consequences of opposing the papal bull Unigenitus (1713)
He withdrew in 1749 to La Varenne-Saint-Maur, near Paris, where he died.
His Spectacle de la nature, ou Entretiens sur les particularités de l'Histoire naturelle qui ont paru les plus propres à rendre les jeunes gens curieux et à leur former l'esprit was published in nine volumes 1732–1742, and widely translated all over Europe. It is not strictly speaking a scientific book but a popularization dealing with serious subjects in a light tone. It participated in the diffusion of the taste for the scientific study in the eighteenth century.
Works
- Histoire du ciel considéré selon les idées des poètes, des philosophes et de Moïse, où l'on fait voir : 1° l'origine du ciel poétique, 2° la méprise des philosophes sur la fabrique du ciel et de la terre, 3° la conformité de l'expérience avec la seule physique de Moïse (1739)
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- De Linguarum artificio et doctrina (1751)
- Concorde de la géographie des différens âges (1764)
- Lettre sur la sainte ampoule et sur le sacre de nos Rois à Reims. (1775)
References
- Montoya, Alicia C. (2021). "18th-Century Traditions of Nature Writing (Noël-Antoine Pluche, Alexander Pope)." In: Cosmopolitan Conservatisms: Countering Revolution in Transnational Networks, Ideas and Movements (c. 1700‒1930). Leiden: Brill, pp. 41–66.
