What keeps a body of knowledge alive? For instance, what enables legal doctrine to grow and keep attracting scholars to contribute to it? Here is one possible answer: pleasure, especially the pleasure of investigating and constructing something together. Pleasure, one might argue, is a key ingredient of knowledge-making. There are many kinds of pleasure, all of which are essential for the pursuit of knowledge: curiosity, attention, surprise, wonder, satisfaction and a sense of self-fulfilment as well as the fun of collaborating with others.

Knowing needs pleasure, but if that is so, then we must also ask: what are the devices, engines, and methods via which pleasure can be enabled and enhanced in epistemic contexts? Further, what are the abilities and faculties via which knowledge-makers can engage in pleasurable activities that keep a body of knowledge alive? What are the technologies and skills of epistemic pleasure?

One exciting place to look for answers to these questions is early modern Europe: then and there, prior to the emergence of professionalised science and its various institutions, disciplinary divisions and market pressures, there were communities of scholars who drew on and combined an enormous variety of pursuits, from alchemy to drama, from observing the stars to engaging in rhetorical exercises, from dissecting insects to composing poems and from engineering bridges to juggling and entertaining in princely courts. Looking back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we see artisanal bodies alongside abstract forms, and instruments for sensory extension (like telescopes and microscopes) alongside genres and practices of reading and writing. Most importantly, perhaps, we see art alongside nature: we witness the recognition of nature’s artifice operating together with arguments for the importance of artifice for investigating nature.

These, at least, are the themes of Javier Patiño Loira’s new sparkly, ingenious book, The Age of Subtlety (2024). With a focus on works in Latin and the vernacular (largely Italian and Castilian) from 1619 to 1654, Patiño Loira reveals to us a world of debate and reflection, and accompanying terminology, that brought together the arts of language with the arts of investigating nature. The Age of Subtlety deftly and dexterously intertwines two realms that we – impoverished moderns – might otherwise easily see as separate: the ingenious practice of inventing conceits (playful, figurative, tropic language) and the equally ingenious play of nature – that is, its generation of phenomena such as comets (part I of the book) and fireflies (part II). Comets and fireflies, it turns out, are the equivalent of tropes in language: comets and fireflies are nature’s poetry, evidence of its playful wit, which we, if we are to investigate it well, need to match with similar ingenuity at the level of language.

In making these connections, Patiño Loira articulates new vistas for historicising knowledge, imagination and intelligence as well as nature. He gives us new ways of thinking about the history of concepts and concept-making, and he reminds us of the dangers of dividing art and science or imagination and knowledge. In this period, across Latin, Italian and Castilian, conceptus, concetto and concepto are never far from conceits (see, e.g., pp. 7–8). Concepts, to be useful for a community of enquirers and knowledge-seekers, need to sparkle: they need to surprise us, invite us to attend, prompt our desire and curiosity, keep us returning and enable us to see and reflect together. Concepts, like comets and fireflies, need to be sharp, waking us up and leaving an impression: they need to be acutum, acutezza, agudeza. Any body of knowledge, whether it is investigating nature or, for that matter, law, needs subtle devices, engines of invention, machines for curious and collective enquiry to bring that body of knowledge to life and thus embroider it with spiriti, vivezze, vivezas.

Knowledge of nature, to put it another way, needs the devices and abilities of artifice: of indirectness, animation, the swerve, dissonance and surprising associations across seemingly disparate phenomena; it needs, in short, a kind of artificial intelligence. Knowledge of nature requires this because nature too – that great theatre, that carnival – has that artificial intelligence; insofar as there is a designer of nature, they also, it turns out, are witty, playful and ingenious. Nature keeps telling jokes – like comets and fireflies – and this, in turn, means that we, enquirers into it, need to have a sense of humour.

You might ask, at this point, why a book like this might be of interest to theorists and historians of law? There are good historical reasons: one of the attractions of this period – early modern EuropeFootnote ¹ – is that just as the above phenomena and disciplines are mixed and treated seamlessly, so law too, and its study, is very much part of this extraordinary compound of knowledge-seeking. Thus, figures such as Francis Bacon – who makes a number of cameo appearances in this book – combine natural philosophy with jurisprudence, experimenting with genres (such as collections of maxims or the writing of fictional worlds) in ways that don’t respect boundaries between art, law and science.

‘Natural law’, or ‘natural jurisprudence’, comes to acquire a very different meaning as a result of reading this book: nature is not, as it comes to be thought of later, the realm of predictable and universal laws, but is, instead, overflowing with anomalies and wonders; it is playful and witty; it is something whose character we witness most clearly in phenomena of the most ephemeral (comets) and small and delicate (fireflies) kind. Rather than, as we (poor moderns again) are keen to do, dividing nature and artifice, what we see in this period is precisely the intertwinement and entanglement of artifice and nature.Footnote ²

Juristic activity needs to be ingenious, for law, like nature, is itself ingenious; it must be, both to survive and to flourish. If it is to stay alive as a body of knowledge, legal doctrine must have recourse to devices, engines, and machines for invention: tropes and figures, such as metaphors, surprising analogies, provisional categories, liminal figures, and non-referential entities. There is, here, a kind of magical pragmatism that law (then and, I would argue, now) knows well: whether it be extensions of jurisdiction via fictionalising writs, or the collective construction of strange and wonderful hypotheticals, or encountering new phenomena by likening them to old ones (e.g. quasi-contract), or the repurposing of old instruments, or many other kinds of engines of legal invention, jurists are all too familiar with law’s need of conceits. Becoming more familiar with conceit-making across epistemic practices – again, from engineering to medicine, from literature to alchemy – can help us tell the history of legal knowledge differently. The history of ingenuity, including in its embodied and material dimensions,Footnote ³ is, it turns out, crucial to the history of law.

Theoretically, too, we have a great deal to learn: Patiño Loira points to a whole range of theoretical works of this period, by figures such as Maciej Sarbiewski (the ‘Polish Horace’, 1595–1640), Emanuele Tesauro (1592–1675) and Baltasar Gracián (1601–58), each of whom reflected deeply on the kinds of language that knowing nature required, but also on the kinds of ability – among writers as well as readers – that these kinds of language called for. Thus, there is in this book a theory of language and a theory of mind (especially the collective, social and interactive mind) that knowledge-making needs.

Language, to be useful for knowledge, cannot be flat-footed and direct: it must sparkle, it must surprise, it must be spicy, it must keep us on our toes. We, in turn, must be capable of being surprised and receptive to playing with such language, but also to playing with each other: we must be curious, but also defer immediate satisfaction; we must take pleasure in difficulty; we must develop a rich palette and taste for the unusual and the anomalous; we must be responsive to each other’s subjectivities; and we must be strangely active and passive at the same time. There is, again, a complex theory of language and mind, but also interaction and community, that this book gives us every reason to investigate further.

The two organising, framing examples of Patiño Loira’s book are beautifully chosen: comets and fireflies overlap (e.g. they are ephemeral, rare, difficult to detect, ludic forms of illumination), but they also each bring out distinctive features of figurative language and ingenuity. Let me say a little more about each, just to give a flavour of this book’s riches.

To understand comets, argued Gracián in his Arte de ingenio (1642), one could see them as torches that lit up the house in which stars and planets dined (p. 39). To see comets in this way was to create a conceit: a place beyond, in which one dwelt as an imaginer, returning, via this detour, to think about comets and the distant skies in new, generative ways. Comets themselves were strange phenomena (as above, one of nature’s jokes),Footnote ⁴ but this also meant we needed jokes of our own to investigate them. Conceits, one could argue, again just like comets, were a form of dissonance (pp. 46–48);Footnote ⁵ a surprising twist or turn that helped us investigate reality by deforming it; a kind of spice (salt or vinegar: pp. 48–49) that rendered its taste more interesting, inviting us to experience it more richly.

Creating discordant concordances or strange and fragile unities, often by relating far-fetched phenomena, was, as Sarbiewski saw it, crucial: ‘A conceit was akin to a riddle, posed and solved as though in a single move as it revealed that what at first sight seemed contradictory was so only in appearance’ (p. 52); ‘a union of seemingly conflicting constituents that derived value from its precarious, nonobvious character’ (p. 53); a strange ‘pairing of terms’ (p. 52) that brought pleasure but also difficulty (it required the reader to work at relating the phenomena), and thus opened up new perspectives from which to understand something unfamiliar. What conceits enabled, as Tesauro would add, is shaping, deforming and transforming rather than reflecting reality: twisting it in order to investigate it. For Tesauro, ‘By rearranging reality through imagination, the inventor of conceits knew reality by transforming it into something new, in a way that placed him or her closer to the artisan who transformed matter through knowledge of its properties than to the philosopher in the act of contemplation’ (p. 71).

The meanderings, the provisionalities, and the transformations of poetry, including its openness to novelty it did not quite fully grasp, was what the complexity of nature called for. The same, incidentally, could be said for normative realities: to appreciate that complexity, and thus to come closer to the multi-faceted character and circumstantiality of value, was only possible with indirect methods and fictional devices, such as imaginary perspectives that kept us moving and reflecting.

One way to think of conceits, as indeed figures in this period did, was to see them as enabling distortions, much like telescopes or microscopes, or other kinds of optical devices, such as anamorphic lenses. Conceits were similar because they ‘applied artifice, in the form of tropes, to intellectual reasoning, while optical devices transformed sight by means of mathematical, specifically optical artifice’; this meant that, whether via optical devices or conceits, one could ‘penetrate otherwise inaccessible aspects of reality’ (p. 85). Conceits in this sense might be likened to sharp objects, even ‘wedges, swords, and arrows’ – devices for ‘pricking’ the mind, for awakening it from its dormant slumbers (p. 86). They were a kind of ‘prosthetics’ (as Gracián put it) ‘that altered the way humans interacted with the world’ (p. 93); both conceits and optical devices used artifice to investigate nature and did so more deeply and more richly than we could just with our bare senses or with an unadorned, seemingly simple and clear language.

Of course, not everyone was a fan. Patiño Loira is very careful to track not only defences of conceits but also attacks on them; conceits were very much contested, even if, on the whole, this was a culture of enquiry that warmed to them. After all, conceits could also be seen, and were by some, as forms of deception, trickery, and falsity. They were a kind of pretence, which could be, and was, used, for devious ends, whether by, for example, institutionalised religion or by secular sovereigns. For English readers, including jurisprudentially orientated ones, the figure looming in the background here is Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, as is well known, was fascinated by optics and optical illusions, and he knew well the dangers, but also promise, of rhetorical language, as well as of mask-wearing, of personification and its political power. In the second half of his Leviathan, he offers a powerful critique of the use of such devices by institutionalised religion, especially the papacy, but – in a way that illustrates precisely the ambiguity, the doubled-sided nature of such devices, of these conceits – he also drew on them in order to legitimise, in the first two parts of his book, the figure of the sovereign – that great, artificial man that decorated his frontispiece. There is, most certainly, an ethics and politics to conceit-making, and one that is equally vital for debates over knowledge and its methods.

Unlike comets, which, though rare and ephemeral, appear on the large scale, lighting up the dark skies, fireflies are small creatures. Their smallness matters, as Patiño Loira shows in his third chapter. This is a smallness not only at the level of physical scale, but also in a more figurative sense, of something lowly, something that comes across as nothing but a pest, a forgettable superfluity. Arguably part of a broader interest in paradoxFootnote ⁶ – and reaching back to the ancient Greek and later Roman sophists, and their praising of seemingly useless things, such as flies and baldness – fireflies became emblematic (forgive the pun: emblems too are visual paradoxes) of devices that enable us to see the beauty and complexity of nature. ‘Luminous small animals’, ‘little flying stars’, ‘small flames with soul’: as Patiño Loira observes, fireflies became objects of ‘affection as well as a category of praise’; like conceits, they were small and beautiful, showing us how language could sparkle (p. 128).

Fireflies were also multiple (pp. 135–38) – they came in swarms. This too was important: conceits often came in groups; they were like small gems that decorated a dress; they sparkled together as a group; together, they lit up the discourse, making it interesting, offering us attractive ways into the world of thought. In that sense they also revealed another aspect of nature’s play: its love of variety,Footnote ⁷ as was also evident in ‘flowers and seashells’ (p. 139). Insects, in all their glorious variety, in all their tiny delicacy, showed nature at its most playful; they revealed, like little else could, its arabesque-like artifice, its ‘endless plasticity and imaginativeness’ (p. 141). There was, of course, a kind of capriciousness (p. 142) about them; they were whimsical and always verging on the ‘grotesque’ (especially when one looked at them close up, through a microscope); there was something potentially monstrous about them. Again, though, in this period especially, this was not something to hide about nature but instead confront or even foreground: through phenomena like insects (it must be acknowledged that fireflies were like the celebrities of the insect world: insects with good PR) nature showed her true colours, which were various, infinitely various, and thus required a colourful language to match. Like nature, any form of discourse that was alive had to be sparkly, multiple, various; it had to be brimming with gems that kept us entranced, ever desirous of more illumination.

Indeed, the question of being ‘alive’Footnote ⁸ was another crucial aspect to the attraction of fireflies and their capacity as a symbol of conceits or the tropes of language. Fireflies showed nature at its most vivacious; fireflies were ‘swift’ and with their ‘capricious swirl’ (p. 152) gave us a sense of what it meant to be alive – to study life. The concept of ‘life’, as Patiño Loira tell us, was ‘at the centre of increasing interest in early seventeenth-century creative and intellectual activity’ (p. 154); and fireflies were the perfect symbol of that: their light ‘recalled the arts of the magician, the alchemist, and the engineer of automatons, accomplices of the inventor of conceits in the pursuit of a new and ambivalent entanglement between natural and human ingenuity, culminating in the quest to create life’ (p. 155). Paradoxically, life could not be understood or recreated directly; it was only via ingenious artifice that we could get close to life and have a chance to remake it. Once again, Patiño Loira’s book offers us a fascinating prehistory of artificial intelligence, including machine-making,Footnote ⁹ and its dreams of recreating the ingenious mind.

If we translate this into legal discourse we might well ask: what are the fireflies (or, indeed, comets) of legal language? What are the glowing miracles, seemingly small and insignificant, of legal knowledge – those features of law that make us thirsty for more, that keep us returning to the well? How has law been animated, including for its students?Footnote ¹⁰ Patiño Loira is very careful, throughout, to pay close attention to how conceits enable a kind of interaction between writers and readers: conceits, in their self-conscious artificiality, remind readers of the ingenuity of authors; but they also take on lives of their own, enabling readers to take them into their own subjectivities. Conceit-making can be taken too far: it can end up as a rather empty performance of an author revelling in their own vanity. But as long as conceits are placed in the context of the dynamics of communication, as long as they are part of an attempt to begin a dialogue, then conceits have a crucial place in bringing knowledge to life – rather like, as Patiño Loira also discusses (see, e.g., p. 175), the tricks of jugglers, they bring a kind of carnivalesque atmosphere to knowledge-making, helping authors to take pleasure in the difficult work of creating concepts, while also giving pleasure to readers, who, in thinking with conceits, become authors of a kind. Conceits, it turns out, are a kind of social magic, creating ephemeral, fragile – but all the more valuable for that – unities between authors and readers.

This is a book jam-packed with new, exciting ways to think about language, mind, knowledge, society and, dare I say, law. Indeed, it would be wonderful to see more collaborations between scholars of early modern science,Footnote ¹¹ literature and the arts of language (grammar, logic,Footnote ¹² rhetoric), with scholars of early modern law. More broadly, it would be a dream to see more scholarship, in and beyond the early modern, in and beyond law, of animated discourse that moves us to think, of the devices, engines and machines made by bodies and many hands that are all so crucial for human engagement with any phenomena, and of the social dynamics – including the double-edged ethics and politics – of sparkly knowledge-making.