Introduction

It might seem counter-intuitive to honour Michael Moriarty, a scholar whose six major monographs add up to over 2000 pages of writing, by dedicating a series of all-too-brief essays to him. Yet, perhaps we can take inspiration from the skilful use of praeteritio used by Jean Racine, who, when faced with the task of praising Louis XIV during his first speech to the Académie française on 30 October 1678, declared: ‘Qui pouvait mieux nous aider à célébrer ce prodigieux nombre d’exploits dont la grandeur nous accable pour ainsi dire, et nous met dans l’impuissance de les exprimer ?’ So perhaps these short articles might indeed be the truest way of recognizing and paying respect to Moriarty’s prodigious and ground-breaking published output. Anybody who knows Michael Moriarty would of course recognize immediately the absurdity of comparing him to a vainglorious monarch, for he is a man of modesty, kindness and decency, someone who is far more likely to look forward to reading and learning from this collection of articles than to glory in the academic equivalent of a spotlight trained upon him. The frequency with which Moriarty’s scholarship plays a key role both in the articles that follow in this special number and in the work of so many researchers, graduates and undergraduates across the world testifies to the mark that he has left and continues to leave. From his seminal first book, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), to his latest work, the monumental study Pascal: Reasoning and Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), Moriarty manages on the one hand to present his argument cogently and persuasively for readers who have yet to encounter early modern French thought and on the other to invite readers who think they have seen it all before to re-evaluate the writings of the period from exciting new angles. To take his study of Pascal as one example, he is not content simply to place Pascal’s thought within the context of the seventeenth century, but he wishes also to question and examine its validity for modern readers. As he writes in the opening pages,