Volume 48, Number 15 · October 4, 2001
'A Modern Socrates'
By Keith Thomas
Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century
by Peter N. Miller
Yale University Press, 234 pp., $40.00
In his day, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) was one of the most celebrated men in Europe. With the exception of Francis Bacon, whom he admired but never met, he was on close terms with virtually all the leading intellectuals of the time. He intervened with the Pope on behalf of his friend Galileo; he urged the great Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius to write the epoch-making book De jure belli ac pacis, which laid the foundations of international law; and he gave shelter to Tommaso Campanella, whose visionary work La città del sole portrayed an ideal commonwealth. He entertained Peter-Paul Rubens, who gave him a self-portrait, and he was painted by Van Dyck.
Review, 3799 words
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