| Summary: | In 1575, the courtier humanism Loys Le Roy, known as Regius, published in Paris De la vicissitude ou variété des choses en l’univers, which will become one of the read histories of civilization in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This article aims at identifying the modus operandi by which Le Roy used ancient and modern neo-Platonic sources in a new perspective: despite the fact of taking into account the principle of correspondence between heaven and earth and the universal harmony, he underlined the importance of individual freedom. This scholar of Coutance, looks back to Plato through the mediation of a kind of Neoplatonism which is mixed, in a syncretistic way, with the Aristotelian conception of “substance”. Relying on the analysis of some passages of the De la vicissitude, the aim is to show how Le Roy accommodates his sources with the notion of vicissitude which involves the idea of the persistence of universal substance. His perspective sheds light on the uniqueness and individuality, which become, in relation to any determinism, a pivotal point, the same pivot of human freedom and the departure point of any progress
|
|---|