Entertaining Questions and Conjectures in Theophraste Renaudot’s Bureau d’Adresse

One key trajectory in the history of knowledge is the epistemological study of how information, often in its raw state, is communicated and transformed into knowledge. Incomplete and uncertain forms of knowledge include queries, desiderata, conjectures, and hints. Queries, quaestiones, originated in multiple textual and oral traditions, including ancient pseudo-Aristotelian problem books, the omnes homines tradition, medieval disputations, and commonplacing. Building on this scholarship, the presentation focuses on a sample of queries from the Huguenot physician Théophraste Renaudot’s conferences held in Paris beginning in the 1630s. It examines how the questions raised by participants, and the diverse responses they elicited, functioned as tools of inquiry. Notably, some questions took the form of conjectures that could be empirically tested and inspired further experimentation and information gathering.

Supported by Richelieu and Louis XIII, Renaudot launched several public welfare projects, among them the Bureau d’Adresse—an information hub for employment, healthcare, housing, loans, and more—where he hosted the conferences on Monday afternoons. Some historians have dismissed the conferences as “unsystematic” and “fragmentary,” arguing that the random selection of questions prevented participants from building on existing knowledge or contributing to the emerging sciences. Such interpretations reflect a positivist framework that privileges certain knowledge (scientia) and philosophical systems while overlooking more provisional, risky, and exploratory modes of inquiry. By attending to queries and conjectures, this contribution explores how early seventeenth-century Parisians engaged productively with uncertain knowledge.