Claire Goldstein is Associate Professor in the Department of French & Italian at the University of California Davis. Her book, Vaux & Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures and Accidents that Made Modern France, appeared in 2008 with the University of Pennsylvania Press. She is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled Comets in the Sun King’s Cosmos. Circulation and Epistemology in Early Modern France. This project examines how the last comets before Halley’s organize curiosity, scrutiny, resistance, and doubt regarding the epistemological status of observation, and crystalize alternative (non-official, sometimes contestatory) networks in which information and texts circulate.