Abstract :
The expert in the early modern period was frequently looked upon with suspicion.
Though expertise was associated with specialized knowledge and skill, it was also associated
with cunning, deception and social climbing. Indeed, such knowledge threatened well-defined
and time-honoured social and disciplinary boundaries. This was certainly the case with practical
mathematics, which was considered by many to be an inferior grade of knowledge,
especially when compared with natural philosophy and theology. This spawned numerous
attempts to elevate the status of practical mathematics and to lend legitimacy to its practitioners.
This article focuses on one such attempt, that of an early sixteenth-century French
cosmographer–explorer–poet named Pierre Crignon. Crignon participated in voyages of
exploration and was renowned as a cosmographer and navigator, but his contemporaries
perhaps best knew him as a poet. The paper examines how Crignon attempted to bring
together and legitimate the disparate forms of his expertise as a navigator, cosmographer,
humanist poet and theologian through the multivalent medium of his poetry, and in particular
through a poem comparing the Virgin Mary to the astrolabe.
