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 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.

Offering an introduction to the world's seas as a platform for global exchange and connection, Michael North offers an impressive world history of the seas over more than 3,000 years. Exploring the challenges and dangers of the oceans that humans have struggled with for centuries, he also shows the possibilities and opportunities they have provided from antiquity to the modern day. Written to demonstrate the global connectivity of the seas, but also to highlight regional maritime power during different eras, A World History of the Seas takes sailors, merchants and migrants as the protagonists of these histories and explores how their experiences and perceptions of the seas were consolidated through trade and cultural exchange. Bringing together the various maritime historiographies of the world and underlining their unity, this book shows how the ocean has been a vital and natural space of globalization. Carrying goods, creating alliances, linking continents and conveying culture, the history of the ocean played a central role in creating our modern globalized world.

Scholarship between Europe and the Levant is a collection of essays in honour of Professor Alastair Hamilton. His pioneering research into the history of European Oriental studies has deeply enhanced our understanding of the dynamics and processes of cultural and religious exchange between Christian Europe and the Islamic world. Written by students, friends and colleagues, the contributions in this volume pay tribute to Alastair Hamilton’s work and legacy. They discuss and celebrate intellectual, artistic and religious encounters between Europe and the cultural area stretching from Northern Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, and spanning the period from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. Contributors: Asaph Ben-Tov, Alexander Bevilacqua, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Charles Burnett, Ziad Elmarsafy, Mordechai Feingold, Aurélien Girard, Bernard Heyberger, Robert Irwin, Tarif Khalidi, J.M.I. Klaver, Noel Malcolm, Martin Mulsow, Francis Richard, G. J. Toomer, Arnoud Vrolijk, Nicholas Warner, Joanna Weinberg, and Jan Just Witkam.

This book concentrates on the sometimes Greek but largely Roman survivals many travellers set out to see and perhaps possess throughout the immense Ottoman Empire, on what were eastward and southward extensions of the Grand Tour. Europeans were curious about the Empire, Christianity’s great rival for centuries, and plenty of information on its antiquities was available, offered here via lengthy quotations. Most accounts of the history of collecting and museums concentrate on the European end. Plundered Empire details how and where antiquities were sought, uncovered, bartered, paid for or stolen, and any tribulations in getting them home. The book provides evidence for the continuing debate about the ethics of museum collections, with 19th century international competition the spur to spectacular acquisitions.

Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies researches the development of knowledge economies in Early Modern Europe. Starting with the Southern and Northern Netherlands as important early hubs for marketing knowledge, it analyses knowledge economies in the dynamics of a globalizing world. The book brings together scholars and perspectives from history, art history, material culture, book history, history of science and literature to analyse the relationship between knowledge and markets. How did knowledge grow into a marketable product? What knowledge about markets was available in this period, and how did it develop? By connecting these questions the authors show how knowledge markets operated, not only economically but also culturally, through communication and affect. Knowledge societies are analysed as affective communities, spaces and practices. Compelling case studies describe the role of emotions such as hope, ambition, desire, love, fascination, adventure and disappointment – on driving merchants, contractors and consumers to operate in the market of knowledge. In so doing, the book offers innovative perspectives on the development of knowledge markets and the valuation of knowledge. Introducing the reader to different perspectives on how knowledge markets operated from both an economic and cultural perspective, this book will be of great use to students, graduates and scholars of early modern history, economic history, the history of emotions and the history of the Low Countries.

A Commerce of Knowledge tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Syria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, Simon Mills investigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and English scholarly and missionary interests: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. Early modern Orientalism is usually conceived as an episode in the history of scholarship. By shifting the focus to Aleppo, A Commerce of Knowledge brings to light the connections between the seemingly separate worlds, tracing the emergence of new kinds of philological and archaeological enquiry in England back to a series of real-world encounters between the chaplains and the scribes, booksellers, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs they encountered in the Ottoman Empire. Setting the careers of its protagonists against a background of broader developments across Protestant and Catholic Europe, Mills shows how the institutionalization of English scholarship, and the later English attempt to influence the Eastern Christian churches, were bound up with the international struggle to establish a commercial foothold in the Levant. He argues that these connections would endure until the shift of British commercial and imperial interests to the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the eighteenth century fostered new currents of intellectual life at home.

This is both a historical detective work -- piecing together an innovative research project of the 1620s -- and a provocative argument, based on the reconstruction of Peiresc's project. Our understanding of the history of historical scholarship needs to be turned upside down. In the "how" and "why" of Peiresc's scholarly practice and, in the chain of those who understood and remembered him, we learn that far from disappearing, antiquarianism (AN) persisted as a major source of historical innovation and renovation, and that this continues up through the present time. Contents: Peiresc and AN; AN and an Archival "Science"; Researching the History of Provence; Peiresc's Medieval Mediterranean in the History of Historiography. Illus.

Vol. 1- includes section "Biblia, devoted to the interests of the Friends of the Princeton Library," v. 11-