Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 640 pp. US$39.95 (cloth).

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/690586

2379-3171

Jetze Touber,

Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsPeter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 640 pp. US$39.95 (cloth).Jetze TouberJetze Touber Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Procureur général of the Republic of Letters: this is how Pierre Bayle characterized Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637). The Provençal gentleman, a contemporary of René Descartes, Hugo Grotius, and Galileo Galilei—to mention only the most famous minds of that period—published little but was a vital conduit of communications between scholars all over Europe. Soon after Bayle pronounced his elegy, however, Peiresc’s fame as a scholarly go-between faded. Modern historiography demanded elaboration of historical materials in ways that were unknown to Peiresc’s late Renaissance. In our own millennium, historians of the humanities have readmitted Peiresc to their hall of fame. This has been due in no small measure to the tireless work of Peter Miller, who has harnessed Peiresc’s paper legacy for an impressive range of publications. Miller’s first book-length treatment of the scholar, Peiresc’s Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), revived the lustre of the seventeenth-century ideal type of the ‘antiquarian’.Miller’s new “Peiresc book” could justifiably also be called a “Mediterranean book” or a “Marseille book,” since both the sea and the port city are as central to this book as is the scholar. Peiresc’s Mediterranean World is, in a way, Miller’s answer to Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée (1949). Around 1930, Braudel first came across Peiresc as a correspondent of Sanson Napollon, the governor of a seventeenth-century French commercial settlement in North Africa. But Braudel, keen on the history of trade and industry, disparaged the importance of the scholar’s archive, not recognizing that it illuminates, and at the same time embodies, early modern communication between France and the Mediterranean.Miller starts from this failed encounter between Braudel and Peiresc, aiming to achieve three goals simultaneously. First, he argues for the importance of the maritime space between Peiresc and his manifold correspondents and for Peiresc’s practical involvement in trade, shipping, and navigation across this space. Second, he highlights the prominence of Marseille as a Mediterranean port city in the early seventeenth century. Finally, he experiments with a new way of writing history, an alternative both to the intellectual history to which Peiresc is easily relegated and to the histoire totale at which Braudel tried his hand in La Méditerranée.To start with the latter of this ambitious set of goals, Miller wants to convey to the reader the experience of distilling socioeconomical and intellectual history from a single set of documents. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s archive, Miller stages a succession of topics which emerge from his research—loosely interrelated but not molded into a coherent narrative. The main text is divided in thirty-six thematic sections that range in length from one single page to as many as twenty-five. One section, of an exceptional eighty pages, chronicles the letters that Peiresc exchanged with correspondents across the Mediterranean during the years 1626–37. It documents Peiresc’s communication with clerics, traders, financers, and sailors around the Mediterranean, month after month, providing oxygen to his intellectual interests such as medals and coins, the Samaritan alphabet, Eastern musical theory, astronomical observations, and measures and weights. In subsequent sections Miller revisits this epistolary material to explore topics such as finance, navigation, piracy, and the postal system, as well as to reflect on documents that simultaneously inform the histories of scholarship and trade, on the historiographical value of names, and on the significance of historical detail. Reading through these sections is like making a long sea voyage, subject to the relentless repetition of the rolling waves, now a gentle ripple, then rough billows.From this ocean of documentation emerges the rhythm of maritime exchange centered on Marseille. This centrality became apparent after 1600, when François Savary de Brèves, trade representative and ambassador, stimulated awareness that a strong presence in the Mediterranean would benefit France. Napollon and Peiresc both belonged to a successive generation who profited from, and continued to build on, the efforts of De Brèves. Napollon’s death and the subsequent fall of the North African settlement of Bastion de France in 1637 marked the decline of this period of Marseillaise prominence. During these decades, Marseille must have been bristling with the presence of Italians, Greeks, Levantines, and North Africans as well as, increasingly, English and Dutch. Peiresc’s archive identifies some important waypoints for sailors coming out of Marseille: Genoa, Malta, Tunis and Algiers, Constantinople and Alexandretta, Aleppo and Sidon, and Cairo and Alexandria. It is telling that Venice had lost its prominence in trade and communications of half a century earlier. However, it should also be noted that Peiresc’s communications did not cover all merchant networks. Spain, for instance, had twice as much traffic with Marseille as had Genoa, but Peiresc had hardly any contacts there.Our understanding of Peiresc as a scholar—most pertinent for readers of this journal—is enriched in two ways. First, we are immersed in a world of practical problems and solutions, the economic and technical substructure of maritime trade, finance, and transport from which Peiresc’s intellectual efforts achievements cannot be separated. Miller acquaints us with the patrons (traveling merchants), captains, money changers, and agents with whom Peiresc was continuously coordinating his initiatives. Even though the individuals whom he entrusted with missions of scholarly inquiry were usually missionaries (Théophile Minuti, Daniel Aymini, Celestinus de Sancto Liduina) or diplomats (Henri de Gournay de Marcheville), around these individuals an intricate network of entrepreneurs and sailors kept the inquiries going. This becomes most evident in complex international projects which Peiresc set up to conduct astronomical measurements simultaneously around the Mediterranean.These projects also alert us to a second important theme in this book: intellectual and commercial interests were often two sides of the same coin. There was no hierarchy between the two. The astronomical observations served to understand celestial motions but also to enhance maps. Merchants and mariners themselves were often partners in intellectual pursuits as much as in business and were treated as equals by Peiresc. Most fascinating is the casual way in which the circulation of books, manuscripts, coins, plants, and observations alternates with schedules of embarkment, payment of debts, delivery of items, quarantine, shipwrecking, confiscation, and ransoming. Commerce, finance, and transport were inextricably bound up with intellectual exchange; this is the most important point that Miller makes throughout this long and tortuous exercise in archival exposition.No review can do justice to the wealth of unexpected insights that this book offers the reader. Three appendixes give a survey of the Nachleben of Peiresc in history, statistical analyses of Peiresc’s letters, and a list of merchants and captains mentioned in Peiresc’s correspondence, together with departures, arrivals, and the types of ship sailed. However, much information elaborated in the main text could easily have been put into appendixes as well. Miller’s choice to serve up archival traces instead of a polished narrative frequently results in rather repetitive, enumerative prose. The style of writing is always elegant and erudite, and the decision to insert photos of archival materials is superb. Nevertheless, the nature of the documentation inevitably creates the experience of going through list after list—much as the historian working in the archive does. It is an exhilarating experiment in historical writing, and in that respect Miller has been successful. However, it is hard to imagine who exactly constitutes the readership for whom this book has been written. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by History of Humanities Volume 2, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Society for the History of the Humanities Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690586 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.