Publisher's Synopsis
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 travelled the Mediterranean, seeking knowledge of matters mundane and exotic travel times and insurance premiums, rare manuscripts and objects from the Orient. Mining the remarkable 70,000-page archive of this Provencal humanist and polymath, Peter N. Miller recovers a lost Mediterranean world of the early 17th 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.
