This book studies the je-ne-sais-quoi and its fortunes in early modern Europe. It examines the expression's rise and fall as a keyword and as a topic of debate, its cluster of meanings, and the scattered traces of its pre-history. It focuses on the je-ne-sais-quoi during the key period 1580-1680 but strays on either side of these limits to trace the expression's precursors and its later fortunes. The je-ne-sais-quoi is now assumed to be a quintessentially French phenomenon, but in the early modern period it also marks the cultures of France's neighbours, and this is reflected in the book's inc ... More

This book studies the je-ne-sais-quoi and its fortunes in early modern Europe. It examines the expression's rise and fall as a keyword and as a topic of debate, its cluster of meanings, and the scattered traces of its pre-history. It focuses on the je-ne-sais-quoi during the key period 1580-1680 but strays on either side of these limits to trace the expression's precursors and its later fortunes. The je-ne-sais-quoi is now assumed to be a quintessentially French phenomenon, but in the early modern period it also marks the cultures of France's neighbours, and this is reflected in the book's inclusion of Italian, Spanish, and English material. It is now assumed, too, that the je-ne-sais-quoi belongs purely to the realm of the literary, but in the early modern period it serves to articulate hitherto unrelated problems in the domains of natural philosophy, the passions, and polite culture, and for that reason it is examined here from an interdisciplinary perspective. Placing major literary and philosophical figures such as Montaigne, Shakespeare, Descartes, Corneille, and Pascal alongside some of their lesser-known contemporaries, this study argues that the je-ne-sais-quoi serves above all to trace a series of first-person encounters with a certain something as difficult to explain as its effects are intense, and which can be expressed only by being expressed differently. The book shows how the je-ne-sais-quoi comes to express that certain something in the early modern period, and suggests that it remains capable of doing so today.