Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (review)

Peter N. Miller. Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xv + 234. Cloth, $40.00.

N.-C. Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) was no philosopher—not by modern lights—nor does he bear much resemblance to his contemporaries, Bacon, Hobbes, or Descartes. Not least, Peiresc should not be confused with his singular friend and biographer, Pierre Gassendi. Compared to these philosophers, Peiresc's thought was unsystematic, his interests undisciplined. As Peter N. Miller argues—sometimes brilliantly—Peiresc was an antiquarian. And indeed, more than any contemporary, the "Prince of Erudition" has come to epitomize the Renaissance ideal of Humanist, Scholar, and Patron. But if Peiresc was no philosopher, neither was he content to write about the "Life of Letters." Peiresc lived it—perhaps to excess—perhaps too literally. Peiresc was no philosopher because his curiosity was unbound, not least, Peiresc published nothing, nary a jot or a tittle.

But paradoxically Peiresc became an emblem of Universal Learning. Isolated at Belgentier in the south of France, his life was monastic—desperately disciplined—it was a life of scribble, scribble, scribble. A tireless correspondent, Peiresc's principal passions were books, cats, and conversation; his correspondence network was the largest in Europe. Struggling to write his friend's biography, Gassendi troubled long over the meaning of Peiresc's life, he lamented that the First Citizen in the Republic of Letters left no published legacy, only piles of unfinished manuscripts and thousands of letters.

Gassendi's Peiresc became a phenomenon—not without curious effects—in his Mirrour of True Nobility (W. Rand, trans. 1657 [Vita, 1641]). An extraordinary expression of the biographer's art, Gassendi's Mirrour tells us a great deal about Peiresc and much about its author. Suffering from bouts of depression, Gassendi took his task seriously, and although he surpassed Boswell's strictest requirements, he returned to Belgentier to gather information and bring closure to his loss. Here Gassendi lived among Peiresc's papers and the objects he loved. Month after month he read bundle after bundle of Peiresc's manuscript letters, each carefully preserved, numbered, and dated.

Gassendi let Belgentier speak. Inside, every room was stacked high in books; corners were crammed with art and antiquities; cabinets with fossils and mummies; niches with telescopes; drawers with pickled chameleons and dried plants. Outside, an exotic garden beckoned as orchards cried out for care: there were sixty varieties of apple, twenty kinds of citron, untold varieties of olive, and of course, fruit of the vine. When Peiresc was alive Belgentier bristled with life, with servants, secretaries, and sophisticated guests. Belgentier spoke to Peiresc's humanity, his curiosity and civility. And if life beat to natural rhythms, it was also driven by a daily regimen of letter writing.

But Belgentier had fallen silent. Now, like an archeological site, Peiresc's unfinished life demanded interpretation. What were these broken fragments? Was this the stuff of tragedy—a shipwreck—was this lost cargo with no destination? Had the Captain followed a bad star? Was the Pole-Star itself suspect?

The solution appeared to Gassendi in the form of a paradox—like the image of a candle in a mirror—it betrayed a public secret, the singular mystery of Peiresc's life. As biographer, Gassendi's task was to fix that image, to turn Clio against Fortuna. To justify Peiresc's passage, Gassendi would write a scholarly life that would seize "the glory of kings." To impress his vision, he would fix his eye on "little true facts." But the big picture was clear. The secret to Peiresc's life was Peiresc's life. It was exemplary.

Gassendi's image still lingers. Indeed, Miller's Peiresc bears strong resemblance to Gassendi's antiquarian—not the nineteenth-century Romantic stereotype, the pigeon-holing pedant—but the industrious, philosophizing scholar. And it's true. Peiresc combated...