Le livre des singularités

About this book

Le livre des singularités by Gabriel Peignot is an erudite miscellany of curiosities written in the early 19th century. It gathers playful yet learned notes, extracts, and anecdotes across theology, philology, history, literature, and everyday oddities into a cabinet of wonders. Readers can expect reflections on creation, strange names and numbers, gastronomic quirks, curious letters and laws, bibliographic rarities, and other whimsical lore delivered in a wry antiquarian voice.

The opening of this miscellany declares itself a fanciful, varied “book of singularities,” then parades an extensive table of contents. An “omitted article” supplies a further variant of the nightingale’s song via a salon anecdote about a comically staged birdsong concert. The author then “begins before the beginning” with ANTÉGÉNÉSIE, summarizing a rare 17th‑century tract on what God did before creation, framed by citations from Plato and others, and excerpts that conclude God eternally contemplates the Word. Next comes a revived 16th‑century episode from Du Bartas’s Semaine on the creation of man, richly detailing the body’s formation (eyes, ears, lungs, heart, etc.), interleaved with prose notes from Boaistuau, followed by a brief passage on the creation of woman and short author notices. The third section starts a light, learned preface on the necessity of names—Adam’s naming, rabbinic and philosophical speculations (including Plato and Sterne), the role of civil registers and the proliferation of languages—leading into a planned collection of bizarre names and words, before breaking off in a note about medieval legends of Adam.