Abstract
We're building a library from a simple image : that of the new stars, taken from José-Maria de Heredia's poem " Les Conquérants ". The previous lecture highlighted a certain dysfunction of this image, insofar as it doesn't fully correspond to astronomical reality. The question is : what is it about the history of discourse that makes this image more probable for the reader of the sonnet, i.e. more likely to be approved ? Most of the time, the acceptability of an image depends on commonly accepted knowledge, which can be the result of either direct experience or indirect knowledge mediated by discourse. It is in this context that we can use the notion of library and probabliotheque, without however postulating that the poet Heredia would have consciously mobilized all the shelves of this library to compose his poem. So far, the sub-library of classical antiquity has been mentioned. We can add that of astronomical discourses : Marcus Manilius, Astronomiques ; Tycho Brahe, De stella nova (1573) ; Dürer's etching Melencolia I (1514) ; Lars von Trier's film Melancholia (2011) ; the " black star " from the film Star Wars ; and Hergé's " mysterious star " (1942). We could also add a geographical sub-library, linking the appearance of new stars to a shift in the earth. It could include texts by Aristotle(Of Heaven) and Dante's Divine Comedy (Canto 26 of " Inferno " ; Canto 1 of " Purgatorio ") as well as those by Portuguese astronomer João Faras (1500) and Italian humanist Pierre Martyr d'Anghiera, author of The New World (1511).
