Over the last four centuries the “Prince of Erudition” has emerged as a title contender for “Renaissance Man.” Celebrated in life and made famous by Pierre Gassendi’s Vita (1641), Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) was dubbed “First Citizen in the Republic of Letters.” The Peiresc legend sprang posthumously from Gassendi’s efforts. As his intimate friend and biographer, Gassendi sought the true meaning of Peiresc’s life. But there was a lingering — albeit public — paradox. Although he had literally lived the life of letters (sometimes writing dozens of letters each day), Peiresc published nothing: nary a jot or a tittle. Practiced with paradox, Gassendi found a solution. Because he had lived the life of letters, Peiresc would become an eduring icon for epistolary exchange. Indeed, if Peiresc’s life was not about publishing books, the republic of letters was not an idealized book club of isolated hermits engaged in silent reading. And so, the Peiresc paradox became the Peiresc virtue. Over the last century generations of scholars have fashioned Peiresc as humanist, patron, and scholar, finally rounding out his image as amateur of the New Science. And indeed, Peiresc was no one-trick pony. He monitored a massive correspondence network. And after Tamizey de Larroque published most of his extant letters a century ago, Peiresc became pivotal. Marking geographical, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries, Peiresc helped define transitions between Italy and France, Provence and Paris, between the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, and perhaps most telling, the gentle shift from correspondence networks to published journals.

The present volume, compiled and written by Peter Miller, contains ten essays that trace Peiresc’s interests in oriental studies during his final years (1628–37). Framed by an introduction and conclusion, the theme of “Peiresc’s Orient” resonates with the author’s earlier book on “Peiresc’s Europe.” Here the essays unfold more or less chronologically, linking Peiresc’s early interests in Greece and Rome as they expanded to the Near East, to Arabic and Hebrew texts, and finally to oriental studies, which Miller identifies with Samaritan, Coptic, and Ethiopic texts.

Peiresc’s path to the past was language. His interest in the Samaritans was supported in the late 1620s by Girolamo Aleandro in Rome, and sustained by the Polyglot project pursued in Paris. For Miller, Peiresc’s early work underscores the importance of the antiquary’s “art of comparison.” Peiresc later developed ties with Pietro della Valle in Rome and Jean Morin in Paris, and he studied Hebrew in Carpentras with Saloman Azubi, though his proficiency (as elsewhere) is not made entirely clear. Peiresc’s introduction to Arabic was prompted by his interest in Islamic coins, though his skills were improved only willy-nilly by local figures. Peiresc eventually engaged in Coptic studies while in contact with Athansius Kircher and Della Valle. Miller argues that these early studies aimed at a unified historical vision of the Mediterranean, particularly as Peiresc’s interests in religion, Gnosticism, and paganism extended to Egypt and North Africa.

The narrative has several themes. Viewing Peiresc as a scholar of “singular intellectual power” (5), Miller argues that a key force was the Mediterranean, indeed, the power of place — geographic, cultural, and commercial — that makes Peiresc’s Orient the place to see seventeenth-century antiquarianism as cultural history, a perspective informed by Arnaldo Momigliano, Miller’s intellectual hero, and yet more specifically, because “Scaliger was Peiresc’s intellectual hero” the two scholars together represent “the highest resolution lenses through which to study oriental learning and the republic of letters in late Renaissance Europe” (4). For Miller, knowing Peiresc means knowing the importance of practice — the role of objects, evidence, and the place of archives and collections as sites of action. And still more daring — even if we take Miller only half seriously — is the view that these beliefs and practices might constitute the “Peireskean tradition” (11, 12).

We know a great deal about Peiresc — clever and curious, sophisticated and shrewd, creative and tireless — yet strangely solitary. Although he loved muskmelon and long-haired cats, he shunned the company of women and habitually dined alone, even when notable houseguests visited. No one questions Peiresc’s fame as patron, his passion for collecting, and his good fortune enlisting able assistants to study anatomy, astronomy, botany, chemistry (and the remaining topical alphabet through zoology). But there is much to learn. Peiresc studies needs a modern edition of his complete correspondence, and, as always, his legacy requires new archival research and critical assessments of his abilities and influence. Here Peiresc provides a path with his “art of comparison.” If we take “Peireskean tradition” seriously — as more than solitary practice — new comparisons and old questions equally apply. What did Peiresc know and who in his time (and in his wake) took note; what innovations brought what effects? And in evermore detail, was Peiresc masterful, passable, or simply persistent as linguist (Greek, Hebrew, Coptic, Arabic, and Samaritan) — and compared with whom? These are difficult questions. Miller has served Peiresc well in what might seem a solitary affair.