The contributions in this volume were papers delivered at a colloquium on Jacques Bongars organised in March 2013 by the Philosophisch-historischen Fakultät of the Universität Bern. The meeting concluded a series of events the previous autumn to mark the 400-year anniversary of Bongars's death, and given that Bongars's library and personal documents have been in Bern since 1632, the location was perfect. The essays included here reflect the interdisciplinary perspectives brought to examine both Bongars's political career as an ambassador in the service of the French crown as well as his scholarly accomplishments and humanist network. After a brief foreword by the editor, Philip Benedict's contribution situates Bongars in the context of the many other Huguenots in the service of the crown, finding that in many respects Bongars was typical of other Protestants who began their employment under Henri of Navarre and weathered the storm to continue service through the 1590s and beyond. Heinz Schilling's essay offers an overview of the development of the structures, institutions and functions of foreign policy during the age of confessionalisation, noting also that Bongars embodied the scholar-diplomat who combined their own personal inclinations and networks with their public service to the state. A case study by Ruth Kohlndorfer-Fries, whose book of 2009 on Bongars so thoroughly demonstrated his international significance for modern scholarship, investigates Bongars's correspondence and exchange of news with a Dutch merchant, Daniel van der Meulen, concluding with a call for further research on Bongars's other contacts. From a different perspective Andreas Ammann surveys Bongars's early intellectual environment and investigates his philological and editorial production, particularly in the case of his edition of the Historiarum Philippicarum epitoma by the Roman historian Marcus Junianus Justinus (Paris 1581). Walther Ludwig and Joanna Weinberg move the discussion east in their contributions by discussing Bongars's peregrination to Constantinople and, based on a single letter in Hebrew in his register, Bongars's engagement with the Jewish community in Prague in 1585 and, plausibly, beyond. Alexa Renggli and Charles-Eloi Vial round out the volume with their essays on the scattered materials relating to Bongars in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The immediate and lasting impressions drawn from these essays are that, for future research on Bongars – his context and contacts – the sum truly is greater than the sum of these parts. Indeed, thanks to the enormous volume of materials left to posterity by Bongars (and others like him), these essays represent tips of a very large iceberg for future work on international relations, foreign policy and scholarly networks across physical and ideological boundaries.