Peiresc (1580-1637) was among the most famous scholars of his generation, and even after his death, as his fame waned, the name still conjured up an aura of authority. Despite all this, his Nachlass has never been studied. Some small percentage of his letters have been critically used, a larger portion of which, perhaps a little less than half, has been published. So far as I can tell, none of those scholars whose names we associate with Peiresc research made use of his working notes or excerpta, even though of the 50,000 surviving pieces of paper, outgoing correspondence amounts to at the most 10%.
My focus over the years has been on his practice as a scholar. I have tried not to get caught up in a priori definfitions of terms such as "antiquarianism," and instead have worked from Peiresc’s practice—and his celebrity as an antiquary—to suggest that the meaning of the term should reflect this practice. And, then, once we go down this road it turns out that there are some significant implications for the general understanding of the history of historical research from the Renaissance through the Twentieth Century.
The different parts of my work on Peiresc are presented on this site:
Peiresc’s Orient details Peiresc’s work in the last pre-disciplinary generation of oriental studies in Europe, and suggests the way in which his practice could, as Momigliano implies, have a family resemblance to what we have come to call "cultural history."
Peiresc and the History of Historical Research has two parts. The first surveys the range of his different practices in order to establish some sense of how his toolkit was used across different kinds of subjects (ie not just oriental studies/ cultural history). This is organized in terms of collecting, describing and comparing. The second, takes off from the rather obvious fact that that the Mediterranean stands between Provence and the Orient. Peiresc approached the Mediterranean with the same attentiveness that he brought to study of the Orient. In his Mediterranean studies we can see he deploying the full extent of his tools: mapping and astronomy, natural history, and medievalism. Peiresc in the contemporary Mediterranean is the subject of a separate study, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Peiresc.
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Peiresc emerges out of this work on the Mediterranean. Its focus is the approximately 1000 letters written by Peiresc to merchants, ships captains, missionaries, diplomats and travellers. These were the people who made it possible for Peiresc to plan his oriental studies and to do his work on the Mediterranean. Putting these letters into a database will allow for repurposing it into diachronic, synchronic, spatial and micro-historical narratives. The information we find in these letters gives us access to a “material culture of cultural history”; the form of this project, in turn, the "digital monograph."
Morphologies of Antiquarianism is the working title for the larger project which is informed by the question: if Peiresc’s practice defines at least a possible norm for what we mean by “antiquary” and “antiquarian” then the history of historical research from the Renaissance to the twentieth century changes a great deal. Various investigations that I am currently making are contributions towards clarifying exactly what such a new history could look like.
Archive refers to an envisioned presentation of scans of Peiresc's letters and papers, along with transcriptions, comment and tagging. These would populate the database driving Peiresc's Mediterranean but also potentially could be expanded to include the complete correspondence.
