If I met Peiresc in the pages of Rubens’ letters, it was the reflected portrait of someone who was curious about everything and dilettantish about nothing that had me hooked. I got started with everything Egypt because someone had just written a book about it that published a lot of his manuscript material, but it also pointed towards a much wider engagement with the Levant and early oriental studies. Only after I had gotten started down this path did I decide to pull back and address the potential reader’s obvious opening question, “Why Peiresc?”, with a book dedicated to that subject . I then returned to write a series of articles on Peiresc’s Samaritan, Hebrew, Arabic and African studies that were eventually gathered into a second book. But all along I wanted to write about two extensive collections of letters built around two research expeditions to Egypt, Lebanon and Syria that Peiresc had organized in 1629 and 1633. Many of them were to the otherwise “invisible” assistants of Mediterranean scholarship, the local fixers, merchants, ship’s captains, and low-level diplomats at the sea’s western and eastern termini. In 1994, when I first saw this material, with its polite formulas and miniscule, quotidian detail I had no idea what to do it. It smacked of Francis Bacon’s “passages of books that concern not story.” By 2012, when I spent a month at the École des Hautes Études in Marseille as the guest of Jean Boutier and Arundhati Virmani, I had figured out how to make it into story. A short book on Peiresc’s medieval studies and a much longer one on his Mediterranean world soon followed. I was interviewed  about why and how I chose to work on Peiresc, and also what I learned from him, in a book of interviews of early modern historians that was published a few years ago. 

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Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. Yale University Press, 2000

Peiresc’s History of Provence and the Discovery of a Medieval Mediterranean. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 101, 2011

Peiresc’s Orient: Antiquarianism as Cultural History in the Seventeenth Century. Ashgate/Variorum, 2012

Peiresc’s Mediterranean World. Harvard University Press, 2015

Thinking in the Past Tense. Eight Conversations, eds. Alexander Bevilacqua, Frederic Clark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 141-65