An account of my favorite story about this dude (1636-1711) can be found in Joan DeJean's Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle. When on January 22, 1687, Charles Perrault (today known mostly for his versions of fairy-tales) stood up before the Académie Française and read a manifesto (written in verse, no less) that defended modern thinkers and writers and claimed their work (including both arts and sciences) was just as good if not better than the work of ancient Athenian and Roman writers, Boileau could literally not sit still. "All accounts confirm that the session produced wear and tear on Boileau's voice in various ways. According to reports from opposing camps, he kept muttering to himself throughout the reading. In Perrault's version of the events, Boileau interrupted the reading by leaping up and crying out that it was scandalous to read this work that criticized the great men of antiquity. According to the version coproduced by the Moderns Regnault de Segrais and Antoine Furetière, Boileau `could not listen to this reading without protesting to everyone about its false premises. He promised loudly to attack it in writing as soon as he could take time from his work.' Huet apparently told Boileau to sit still and be quiet..." It is then reported that Boileau mysteriously lost his voice altogether (and left Paris). (The 20th-century historian of French classical literature, Antoine Adam, has argued that Boileau's loss of voice was hysterical.) Boileau went off to take the cure at a spa. Shortly after his return to Paris, his attack on the novel form was published in Holland. The novel, Boileau claimed, was an agent of corruption, a dangerously subversive form of literature and a threat to the nation's moral fiber. And his key target was Madeleine de Scudéry. It was she who had taught people disrespect for the ancients by feminizing them. And of course there were a host of other women writers, too, who had followed her lead-- bestsellers, demonstrating that the novel had conquered the epic's territory.

Ironically, the people claiming Boileau as their revered authority on what literature should be do so to bolster their argument that science fiction of the 30s, 40s and 50s is the best, true literature of modern times, and that writers who don't strive to imitate this older work are "ruining," "corrupting" and "weakening" science fiction-- and feminizing (or castrating) its heroes. Boileau hated the novel, and would have despised the very work these people idolize. Moreover, Boileau thought Aristotle the last word on physics. No doubt he considered Newtonian mechanics inferior to Aristotle's Physics. But then when reactionaries reach to the past to authorize their own dogma, they never bother to pay attention to the broader context from which they've extracted a name and a quote.

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