Peiresc’s Mediterranean World by Peter N. Miller (review)

A work of considerable sophistication, Peter N. Miller’s Peiresc’s Mediterranean World can be read on multiple levels. At the deepest level, it is a reflection on the role of narrative in history and an attempt to model a new kind of narrative; but the book also functions on other, equally important levels. It is a portrait of a seventeenth-century antiquarian scholar and his world, an introduction to his remarkable archive, and an intimate picture of early modern life in the Mediterranean region, all in addition to being a model of historical scholarship and a case study in the innovative use of primary source documents.

Scion of a well-established Provençal family, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) stood at the centre of the early-seventeenth-century “Republic of Letters.” He was hailed by his contemporaries (in various metaphors) as the “pilot” at the helm of the ship of learning, or as the “stomach” of this intellectual body, transforming the nutrients provided by its members into the “blood” that circulates throughout. In this central role, he wrote a staggering number of letters, memoranda, and notes, which he gathered in a huge working archive, a kind of “surrogate brain,” of which today 77,000 pages survive. Miller’s immersion in this archive is transforming our understanding of what it meant to be a scholar — and, more particularly, an antiquarian — in the early modern period.

One persistent theme in Miller’s writings about Peiresc — this is his third outing in book form — concerns the caricature of the early modern antiquarian “as someone alienated from the present and dead from the waist down” (5). In Peiresc’s Mediterranean World, he definitively lays this caricature to rest, tying Peiresc’s intellectual world to a vital and everpresent material one, specifically to the port of Marseilles and the Mediterranean Sea beyond. Focusing on archival material from around 1626 until his death in 1637, when the travels of an increasingly frail Peiresc were limited to Provence, Miller details, year by year, month by month, how Peiresc pursued scholarly enterprises in the Levant by proxy, feeding an immense curiosity, not only about the past but about all things human and natural. This activity entailed intercourse with all kinds of people, from muleteers to merchants to ships’ captains to diplomatic emissaries; it also entailed the creation of a vast, Mediterranean-wide network of friends and associates, along with their friends and associates, to facilitate both the transmission of letters and the transfer of funds to purchase and ship a wide range of documents, artifacts, and specimens, animate as well as inanimate. The process of transshipment alone embroiled Peiresc intimately in a host of details such as the nature of packaging materials, concerns about piracy and shipping routes, the intricacies of quarantine regulations and how to circumvent them, preferred carriers and sailing times. These mundane matters might appear to us as ephemeral to his scholarly interests, but Miller asks us to reverse the emphasis and regard his scholarship as but an aspect of his engrossing engagement with the complexity of this world; indeed, there is no separation between the two, given that everything fed his curiosity.

By conjoining the intellectual and the material in the life of one man, Miller also shows how to conjoin the two on a larger, Mediterranean-wide scale, using Peiresc’s writings to illuminate early modern postal arrangements, financial transactions, trade patterns, port practices, pirate activities, and patterns of social migration. In this regard, he has written a work to supplement Ferdinand Braudel’s classic study of the Mediterranean. Indeed, the narrative portion of the book begins and ends with Braudel’s encounter with Peiresc’s archive in 1932, at a time when Braudel had already chosen the Mediterranean as his ultimate subject matter. He came away from this encounter disappointed, in part because he read Peiresc’s letters looking for the threads of a historical narrative; he did not understand the extent to...