“Ie me suis le premier efforcé de rompre la glace". Gabriel Naudé e la scrittura di sé tra ordine librario e crisi politica

During the final season of French Renaissance – the decades leading from Montaigne to Descartes – the relationship between scholars and written knowledge (books) changes from an a-systhematic to a more systematic form: this fact is evident to those comparing Chapter II, 10 of the Essais (About Books) by Michel de Montaigne (1592) with the Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque by Gabriel Naudé (1627). Nonetheless, the assumption that writing about books and libraries (as a system of organization of knowledge) is for a man of the Renaissance nothing more than writing about himself, remains the same. This article aims to show how the humanistic principle of a correspondence between the single Scholar and Culture is based on the same general principle of Renaissance anthropology: the single man is a reduced- scale model of the entire world. Organizing a Library means, to these men, writing an auto-biography and giving to others the opportunity of obtaining examples and instructions about life-managing.