More books should be like Miller’s Peiresc’s Mediterranean World. Self-reflexive, experimental, ambitious, and meticulous, it confronts the question of how historians might understand the early modern Mediterranean—Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean—if instead of annaliste social science they emphasized an empirical investigation of seventeenth-century antiquarian Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc’s massive archive. The result might not be to the taste of every reader, given the extraordinary detail and the attention to epistemological issues over historical narrative. But Miller’s achievement is powerful and provocative.
Much of the book consists of penetrating descriptions of how Peiresc acquired his enormous collection of correspondence, memoires, objects, images, and more. Peiresc might seem an odd candidate to exemplify Europe’s intellectual community. He was based in Aix near commercial Marseille, with no connection to a patron or a university. Moreover, he was little concerned with theology, philosophy, and rhetoric, and he published only one work. But Miller shows how...