Du merveilleux scientifique au Moyen Âge ou raison et fiction

The article identifies two principal functions of the marvellous in scientific texts. The first concerns a rhetoric of persuasion which entails demonstrating the superiority of scholarly discourse by assimilating the marvellous with an illusion to be dissipated by rational knowledge. The second makes the marvellous a veritable means of accessing knowledge, serving to explore what relates to the domain of the possible without necessarily manifesting itself in the real.