Peiresc, Riolan, and the Library as a Site of Humanist Science

Abstract

Abstract Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), the “prince of the Republic of Letters,” and Jean Riolan the younger (1580–1657), the “prince of anatomists,” would seem to have little in common apart from the coincidence of their birth years. It is not clear that they knew each other, although they had many common acquaintances, including Gabriel Naudé, and both engaged in knowledge practices based on both texts and objects. Both were antiquarians with a deep knowledge of classical antiquity, and both were great collectors of books. In the case of the identity of the fossil bones of the supposed ancient king Theutobochus, the responses of Riolan and Peiresc reveal a common devotion to library-based humanist science while they simultaneously evaluated material evidence. These libraries were not passive repositories but dynamic sites of knowledge creation where natural philosophy and humanist scholarship mutually informed each other.