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

As the old saying goes, you wait over 350 years for a new study of the seventeenth century's most celebrated antiquary, and then suddenly three come along in the space of two decades. Or, rather, Peter N. Miller comes along. For nobody, and I mean nobody, dead or alive, knows Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) better than Miller. Peiresc was a man of insatiable curiosity, a polymath, philologist, and cat lover ("I really like that kind of animal"), whose interests stretched across a perplexing variety of objects—manuscripts, printed books, coins, fossils, gems, pottery, mummies—and subjects ranging from the rhythms of the tides to the movements of Jupiter to the contemporary practices of Samaritans, Copts, and Muslims, to name just a few. A dozen forests were felled for the sake of this man's wonder at the world: 70,000 pieces of paper survive as witnesses to the correspondence networks that connected this "landlocked orientalist" in Provence to worlds of information spanning the old and new worlds. Miller has read it all, amazingly, and what a palette to work from. Three books (first Peiresc's Europe in 2000, then his Orient in 2012, now his Mediterranean) and a slew of articles later, and the message is clear: merchants really mattered. Mere humanists and university scholars were not enough for Peiresc. Instead, knowledge resided in the practical and nimble expertise of merchants, the familiar factors of Marseille but also those faceless agents farther afield whom Peiresc could only identify by their handwriting. Miller is a master of the micro, to be sure, but he is also fighting with ghosts throughout the book: Fernand Braudel, S. D. Goitein, Henri Pirenne, they are all there vying for a spot alongside Miller's protagonist. But amid the cacophony of their voices, one question goes unanswered: how much of Peiresc's (or is it Miller's?) Mediterranean is part of a wider world of practices shared by contemporaries far beyond the bustling hub of Marseille? If Peiresc is a tree, what does this forest look like? Indeed, might there even be other "Peirescs" awaiting discovery, from the same period, in Alexandria, Damascus, or Mosul? Only time will tell.