Going deep down the Peiresc rabbithole, all 50 odd thousand pieces of paper, made it clear to me that both for the quality of my own thinking and to connect it to work being done by other people—in other words, to avoid the danger of solipsism—one of the worthwhile things I could do was to contextualize Peiresc. The simplest, though not easiest, way to do this was to try and trace his reception by capturing stray references to him wherever they were found. That lay a kind of keel. In fact, when I first began working on Peiresc in the mid 1990s, one of the first things I studied was his work on the Samaritans. This led me laterally to the project he participated in of making a Polyglot Bible in Paris. Wanting to understand what these were led me to work towards a wider study of this early modern type of Bible. Working on the Peiresc materials, I saw him doing things that later were systematized as the Auxilia historica, or historische Hilfswissnschaften. At BGC, I organized a series of seminars on the “Auxiliary Sciences” today to connect “our” study of material culture to a much older stratum of historical work that did the same, but without that continuity being recognized. The series had the consequence of identifying for me productive areas of study. Antiquarianism was, indeed, the fore-history of material culture studies. The history of antiquarianism had never been written in one volume (that was Momigliano’s lament in 1950), and I never took it as my brief to try and remedy this situation, but I did launch several probes into that little explored territory on a preliminary basis.  Some of those probes  stretched the afterlife of antiquity across deep space, and others well into our own time, raising a series of questions I came to explore much later. The book I ended up writing tried to make the connection between the long story historical study of objects and our present preoccupation with things.  Along the way, I was involved in co-curating two very different exhibitions, both of which were intensely focused on objects. The first was built around the objects named in the inventory of a seventeenth-century Dutch woman who died in Brooklyn in 1696. The second was an aesthetic and poetic dive into Richard Tuttle's collection of objects from around the world.

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“Les origines de la Bible Polyglotte de Paris: philologia sacra, Contre-Reforme et raison d'état,” XVIIe Siècle, 194 (1997), 57-66

“Making the Paris Polyglot Bible: Humanism and Orientalism in the early Seventeenth Century,” Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus/ The European Republic of Letters in the Age of Confessionalism, ed. H. Jaumann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 59-86

Dutch New York Between East and West: the World of Margrieta van Varick. With Deborah Krohn. Yale University Press , 2009

“Thinking with Thomas Browne: Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian, The World Proposed: Sir Thomas Browne Quatercentenary Essays, eds. Reid Barbour and Claire Preston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 311-28

“Major Trends in European Antiquarianism, Petrarch to Winckelmann,” The Oxford History of Historical Writing vol.3, ed. Daniel Woolf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 244-60

“Writing Antiquarianism: Prolegomenon to a History,” Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800,  eds. Louis and Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012, 27-57

“Comparing Antiquarianisms: A View from Europe,” Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800, eds. Louis and Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012, 103-45

“Piranesi and the Antiquarian Imagination,” Giovanni Battista Piranesi, eds. Sarah Lawrence and John Wilton-Ely (New York: Abrams, 2007), 123-38
“What Price Innovation? The Cost of Printing the Paris Polyglot Bible,” Tributes to David A. Freedberg: Image and Insight, ed. Claudia Swan. Turnhout: Brepols, 2019,  27-39

“The Ancient Constitution and the Genealogist: Momigliano, Pocock, and Peiresc’s Origines Murensis Monasterii (1618).” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (May 1, 2009): http://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/ancient-constitution-and-genealogist-momigliano-pocock-and-peiresc%E2%80%99s-origines-murensis

“Peiresc and the Benedictines of Saint-Maur: Further Thoughts on the ‘Ethics of the Historian,’” Europäische Geschichtskulturen um 1700 zwischen Gelehrsamkeit, Politik und Konfession, eds. Thomas Wallnig, Ines Peper, Thomas Stockinger, Patrick Fiska. Berlin De Gruyter, 2012, 361-78

“A Tentative Morphology of European Antiquarianism, 1500-2000,” World Antiquarianism, eds. Alain Schnapp, Peter N. Miller, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Tim Murray. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013, 67-87

Cultural Histories of the Material World. Cultural Histories of the Material World 3. University of Michigan Press, 2013

“Goethe and the End of Antiquarianism,” For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, eds. Ann Blair, Anja Goeing. Leiden: Brill, 2016, 897-916

History and its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture Since 1500. Cornell University Press, 2017

Richard Tuttle: What is The Object? Bard Graduate Center, 2022