The Poetics of Nothing: Jean Passerat’s ‘De Nihilo’ and its Legacy

Abstract

On 1 January 1582 the poet and scholar Jean Passerat (1534–1602) sent a gift to his patron Henri de Mesmes: a poem in Latin hexameters about nothing (“De nihilo”). It became a literary sensation, prompting, over the next decades, a long and varied sequence of poetic and prose responses in Latin and vernacular languages by various authors competing to out-do Passerat, and one another, in ingenuity. Why did this poem catch the imagination of so many as the sixteenth century turned into the seventeenth? This article offers the first complete account of the ‘Nothing’ phenomenon, as it passed between multiple languages, literary genres and cultural contexts. It traces its dissemination via networks linked to institutions of learning, to academies and salons, to patrons and to coteries of poets. Focusing on the French context in particular, it then goes on to argue that the literary and political significance of these texts is greater than has hitherto been recognized.