Le discours zoologique à cheval sur l’imaginaire et la science

Abstract The article is about the rhetorical instruments and discourses used by La Peyrère in his Relation du Groenland (1647) in order to describe the unicorns and the monsters, two species typical of the early modern Greenlandic zoology. Similarly to the geography of Greenland which, at the time, was under the sign of ambiguity, the description of the two species is partly governed by the uncertainty. Whilst the unicorn is dealt with by means of observations based on empirical experiences, the monsters are described exclusively on the basis of a knowledge acquired from books. The description of the two species is founded on rhetorical devices like the comparison and the synecdoche.