Peiresc’s Mediterranean World

Peiresc’s Mediterranean World
Author: Peter N. Miller
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2015-05-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674744063

Antiquarian, lawyer, and cat lover Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) was a “prince” of the Republic of Letters and the most gifted French intellectual in the generation between Montaigne and Descartes. From Peiresc’s study in Aix-en-Provence, his insatiable curiosity poured forth in thousands of letters that traveled the Mediterranean, seeking knowledge of matters mundane and exotic. Mining the remarkable 70,000-page archive of this Provençal humanist and polymath, Peter N. Miller recovers a lost Mediterranean world of the early seventeenth century that was dominated by the sea: the ceaseless activity of merchants, customs officials, and ships’ captains at the center of Europe’s sprawling maritime networks. Peiresc’s Mediterranean World reconstructs the web of connections that linked the bustling port city of Marseille to destinations throughout the Western Mediterranean, North Africa, the Levant, and beyond. “Peter Miller’s reanimation of Peiresc, the master of the Mediterranean, is the best kind of case study. It not only makes us appreciate the range and richness of one man’s experience and the originality of his thought, but also suggests that he had many colleagues in his deepest and most imaginative inquiries. Most important, it gives us hope that their archives too will be opened up by scholars skillful and imaginative enough to make them speak to us.” —Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books

The Sea

The Sea
Author: Peter N. Miller
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2013-04-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472118676

A unique volume that addresses how a thalassographic frame opens up new and important questions for the study of history

Peiresc’s Mediterranean World

Peiresc’s Mediterranean World
Author: Peter N. Miller
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2015-05-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674425774

Antiquarian, lawyer, and cat lover Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) was a “prince” of the Republic of Letters and the most gifted French intellectual in the generation between Montaigne and Descartes. From Peiresc’s study in Aix-en-Provence, his insatiable curiosity poured forth in thousands of letters that traveled the Mediterranean, seeking knowledge of matters mundane and exotic. Mining the remarkable 70,000-page archive of this Provençal humanist and polymath, Peter N. Miller recovers a lost Mediterranean world of the early seventeenth century that was dominated by the sea: the ceaseless activity of merchants, customs officials, and ships’ captains at the center of Europe’s sprawling maritime networks. Peiresc’s Mediterranean World reconstructs the web of connections that linked the bustling port city of Marseille to destinations throughout the Western Mediterranean, North Africa, the Levant, and beyond. “Peter Miller’s reanimation of Peiresc, the master of the Mediterranean, is the best kind of case study. It not only makes us appreciate the range and richness of one man’s experience and the originality of his thought, but also suggests that he had many colleagues in his deepest and most imaginative inquiries. Most important, it gives us hope that their archives too will be opened up by scholars skillful and imaginative enough to make them speak to us.” —Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books

Peiresc's Europe

Peiresc's Europe
Author: Peter N. Miller
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300082524

Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) was, during his lifetime, one of Europe's most famous men. A friend of Pope Urban VIII and Galileo, of Peter-Paul Rubens and Hugo Grotius, of Tommaso Campanella and Marin Mersenne, Peiresc played an important role in the intellectual culture of his time. This book is the first study in English of this extraordinary man, as well as a vivid portrait of his whole circle. Looking through the lens of Peiresc's life, Peter N. Miller brings into focus the early-seventeenth-century world of learning--its people, places, and ideas. Drawing on the extensive Peiresc archive (more than 50,000 pieces of paper), Miller brilliantly evokes the lives of antiquaries, philosophers, theologians, and politicians of Peiresc's day, only some of whom remain known today. He explores the age in which Peiresc's toleration and sociability, his political action and cosmopolitanism, and his serious scholarship without dogmatism were identified as a set of virtues and practices by which to live. Peiresc's notion of scholarship as a moral exercise, the sweep of his interests, and the cross-Continental reach of his intellectual life show with new clarity what it meant to be a man of learning during the decades around 1600.

Peiresc's Orient

Peiresc's Orient
Author: Peter N. Miller
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2017-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351219685

The ten essays published in this volume were written over the space of a decade, but they were conceived from the start as a coherent whole, presenting Peiresc's study of discrete languages and literatures of the Near East and North Africa. For Peiresc the student of the Classical past, this described the eastern and southern space in which the Greeks and Romans lived and strove. For Peiresc the Christian, this was the world of the Bible that impacted upon the Greeks and Romans. And for Peiresc of the Mediterranean (for he was born in Aix, spent much time in Marseille, and lived outside of the region for only 6 of his 57 years), this was the territory that his friends and colleagues sailed to, lived in and, usually, came back from. The convergence of these axes in the life of one man, and a man of singular intellectual power and charm whose vast personal paper arsenal had survived, makes this such a compelling project. The essays are arranged in a roughly chronological order. They follow the course of Peiresc’s own projects from his early encounter with the ancient Near East in Greek and Roman literature, through his engagement with Arabic to his deepening kowledge of rabbinic texts to the wider world of the new oriental studies of the seventeenth century which he helped create: Samaritan, Coptic and Ethiopic.

For the Sake of Learning

For the Sake of Learning
Author: Ann Blair
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 1172
Release: 2016-06-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004263314

In this tribute to Anthony Grafton, a preeminent historian of early modern European intellectual and textual culture and of classical scholarship, fifty-eight contributors present new research across the many areas in which Grafton has been active. The articles span topics from late antiquity to the 20th century, from Europe to North American, and a full spectrum of fields of learning, including art history, the history of science, classics, Jewish and oriental studies, church history and theology, English and German literature, political, social, and book history. Major themes include the communities and dynamics of the Republic of Letters, the reception of classical texts, libraries and book culture, the tools, genres and methods of learning. Contributors are: James S. Amelang, Ann Blair, Christopher S. Celenza, Stuart Clark, Thomas Dandelet, Lorraine Daston, Mordechai Feingold, Paula Findlen, Anja-Silvia Goeing, Robert Goulding, Alastair Hamilton, James Hankins, Nicholas Hardy, Kristine Louise Haugen, Bruce Janacek, Lisa Jardine, Henk Jan de Jonge, Diane Greco Josefowicz, Roland Kany, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Arthur Kiron, Jill Kraye, Urs B. Leu, Scott Mandelbrote, Suzanne Marchand, Margaret Meserve, Paul Michel, Peter N. Miller, Glenn W. Most, Martin Mulsow, Paul Nelles, William R. Newman, C. Philipp E. Nothaft, Laurie Nussdorfer, Jürgen Oelkers, Brian W. Ogilvie, Nicholas Popper, Virginia Reinburg, Daniel Rosenberg, Sarah Gwyneth Ross, Ingrid D. Rowland, David Ruderman, Hester Schadee, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Richard Serjeantson, Salvatore Settis, Jonathan Sheehan, William H. Sherman, Nancy Siraisi, Jacob Soll, Peter Stallybrass, Daniel Stolzenberg, N.M. Swerdlow, Dirk van Miert, Kasper van Ommen, Arnoud Visser, Joanna Weinberg and Helmut Zedelmaier.

Pierre Gassendi

Pierre Gassendi
Author: Delphine Bellis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2023-04-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1315521717

Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) was a major figure in seventeenth-century philosophy and science and his works contributed to shaping Western intellectual identity. Among “new philosophers,” he was considered Descartes’s main rival, and he belonged to the first rank of those attempting to carve out an alternative to Aristotelian philosophy. In his writings, he promoted a revival of atomism and Epicureanism within a Christian framework, and advocated an empiricist and probabilistic epistemology which was to have a major impact on later thinkers such as Locke and Newton. He is moreover important for his astronomical work, for his defense of Galileo’s mechanics and cosmology, and for his activity as a biographer. Given the importance of Gassendi for the history of science and philosophy, it is surprising to see that he has been largely ignored in the Anglophone world. This collection of essays constitutes the first book on Gassendi in the English language that covers his biography, bibliography, and all aspects of his work. The book is divided into three parts. Part I offers a reconstruction of the genesis of Gassendi’s Epicurean project, an overview of his biography, and analyses of Gassendi’s early attacks on Aristotle, of his advocacy of Epicurean philosophy, and his relation to the skeptical tradition and to Cicero’s thought. Part II addresses Gassendi as a participant in seventeenth-century philosophical and scientific debates, focusing especially on his controversies with Descartes and Fludd. Part III explores Gassendi’s contributions to logic, theories of space and time, mechanics, astronomy, cosmology, and the study of living beings, and presents the reception of Gassendi’s thought in England. This book is an essential resource for scholars and upper-level students of early modern philosophy, intellectual history, and the history of science who want to get acquainted with Pierre Gassendi as a major philosopher and intellectual figure of the early modern period.

In Times of Strife

In Times of Strife
Author: Charles Webster
Publisher: Taylor Institution Library
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1838464131

The book explores the pursuit of humanitarian objectives in the face of war, exile and extreme social dislocation. Each chapter covers a pair of intellectuals and artists: Samuel Hartlib & Comenius, John Hall & William Rand, Ernst Barlach & Jakob Steinhardt, Salo & Robert Pratzer.

World Antiquarianism

World Antiquarianism
Author: Alain Schnapp
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2014-02-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1606061488

The term antiquarianism refers to engagement with the material heritage of the past—an engagement that preceded the modern academic discipline of archaeology. Antiquarian activities result in the elaboration of particular social behaviors and the production of tools for exploring the collective memory. This book is the first to compare antiquarianism in a global context, examining its roots in the ancient Near East, its flourishing in early modern Europe and East Asia, and its manifestations in nonliterate societies of Melanesia and Polynesia. By establishing wide-reaching geographical and historical perspectives, the essays reveal the universality of antiquarianism as an embodiment of the human mind and open new avenues for understanding the representation of the past, from ancient societies to the present.