ABSTRACT
Arguably the most provocative medieval rhetorical theorist of the new art form that takes shape in Troubadour poetry is Geoffrey de Vinsauf. Self-reflexivity for Geoffrey, as for many modern theorists to follow, is bound up with a kind of evacuation of proper or literal meaning or determinate reference. Alexandre Leupin presents Geoffrey's project as self-consciously inaugurating a programmatically new approach to poetics. Pure reflexivity makes everything a revelation of what is absolutely other to any possible description. Leupin connects the origin of modern science to Christianity by stressing the doctrine of the Incarnation as the fundamental "epistemological break" that distinguishes the West and enables it to develop its empirical science and applied technology. Leupin works from Alexandre Koyre, who articulates an historical understanding of modern science as building on medieval-Scholastic scientific breakthroughs. Science and poetry emerge in modernity as complementary ways in which self-reflection constructs the objectively real under the sign of a theology of the Incarnation.
