Peiresc
I suppose that all scholars are likely to develop at least some interest in the history of scholarship itself. Most of us, however keen our aspirations to the cutting edge may be, have to acknowledge that we are but the metaphorical dwarves raised upon the shoulders of the actual giants who have preceded us. Their huge contributions to our cultural growth derive only in part from their individual genius. There is also the question of the preservation of that genius in transmissible written form. We owe to the labors of medieval monks the mediation of a vast body learning from classical Antiquity which, for the most part, the mediators themselves were incapable of understanding fully. The library is the closest thing we have to an immortality machine.
This thought, and the subject of this essay, came to mind last week while reading a biographical essay about Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. Peiresc (1580 -1637) is hardly a household name, but as I shall explain he played an important role in my own bibliographic education fifty years ago. He was a French antiquary, astronomer, and polymath scholar whose vast scholarly correspondence is almost a model of the mode of intellectual exchange that would characterize the Enlightenment period of the century and a half after his death.* Peiresc was born in rural Provence, and spent much of his life in and around Aix-en-Provence. We are all familiar with the country gentleman. More important for me was the country scholar.
Joan and I were married in the late spring of 1962 and set off, more or less immediately, for a fabulous year of research and writing, mainly in France. My manuscript researches on the Roman de la Rose naturally first focused on the collections of two great national libraries: the library of the British Museum in London and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Only when I settled down to write in a tiny village in Vaucluse did I come to appreciate the pleasures and resources of many of the provincial French libraries. Our village was called Beaumes-de-Venise, within fairly easy access to Avignon, where the library of the Musée Calvet (of which I had never heard) proved a gold mine for my needs. On my first research leave, in the year of semi-Revolution, 1968, I had further opportunity to explore the local scholarly environs when—now delightfully augmented by two small children—we settled down for a time in L’Isle-sur-Sorgue, near Petrarch’s old haunts at the foot of Mont Ventoux.
and
the Archbishop
There is every reason that
Avignon, once a capital and papal city, might have a significant library, but I
was amazed by the mouldering treasures of the town library of the grim little
city of Draguignan. Even more amazing
was Carpentras, a place I had never even heard of before I drove by it on my
way to buy melons in the “melon capital of the world,” Cavaillon. Carpentras (Vaucluse), with a population
today of perhaps 30,000 was the “big city” for the two Provençal villages in
which we have lived. Like many small
towns and small cities in the south of France and northern Italy, it remembers
a vanished past with imposing public architecture that today seems outsized: an
ambitious town hall, an ancient synagogue, and above all an architecturally
dazzling library/museum, the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine. This was the pet project of the humanist-monk
Archbishop of Carpentras from 1735 to 1757, Joseph-Dominique (Malachias)
d’Inguimbert. Many French ecclesiastic
institutions did not survive the Revolution, but this jewel, and its large and
precious collection of early printed books, miraculously emerged more or less
intact. The day I first visited it there
was on display a small collection of learned works by the local scholar
who—according to the information posted—had been one of the Archbishop’s chief
inspirers: Fabri de Peiresc, who had been born just down the road!
Had I found the peer of the Morgan
or Newbury Libraries in a suburb of Altoona, I could not have been more
surprised or delighted. In the half
century since I stumbled upon it, the Commune of Carpentras has continued to
maintain, improve, and expand this living monument to the learning of the
past. The idea that a communal library
might be a civic necessity and a civic treasure was once universal, and has had
a particular impact on the cultural histories of the English-speaking world,
including the United States in its formative period.
There is every reason that Avignon, once a capital and papal city, might have a significant library, but I was amazed by the mouldering treasures of the town library of the grim little city of Draguignan. Even more amazing was Carpentras, a place I had never even heard of before I drove by it on my way to buy melons in the “melon capital of the world,” Cavaillon. Carpentras (Vaucluse), with a population today of perhaps 30,000 was the “big city” for the two Provençal villages in which we have lived. Like many small towns and small cities in the south of France and northern Italy, it remembers a vanished past with imposing public architecture that today seems outsized: an ambitious town hall, an ancient synagogue, and above all an architecturally dazzling library/museum, the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine. This was the pet project of the humanist-monk Archbishop of Carpentras from 1735 to 1757, Joseph-Dominique (Malachias) d’Inguimbert. Many French ecclesiastic institutions did not survive the Revolution, but this jewel, and its large and precious collection of early printed books, miraculously emerged more or less intact. The day I first visited it there was on display a small collection of learned works by the local scholar who—according to the information posted—had been one of the Archbishop’s chief inspirers: Fabri de Peiresc, who had been born just down the road!
Had I found the peer of the Morgan or Newbury Libraries in a suburb of Altoona, I could not have been more surprised or delighted. In the half century since I stumbled upon it, the Commune of Carpentras has continued to maintain, improve, and expand this living monument to the learning of the past. The idea that a communal library might be a civic necessity and a civic treasure was once universal, and has had a particular impact on the cultural histories of the English-speaking world, including the United States in its formative period.
Free Library of Proctor VT
Years ago I often spent part of my
summers teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College in
Vermont. We have many happy family
memories of those years, which offered a kind of family vacation in the
beautiful mountains in tandem with an intense professional experience for
myself offering the opportunity to work with unusually rewarding students and
colleagues. The Vermont countryside is
dotted with small towns dotted with public spaces of a certain historical
ambition, such as bandstands and extensive town greens. I was particularly impressed by the number
and size of the public libraries, often monuments of substantial private
philanthropy of the nineteenth century.
The Free Library of Proctor, a town of a couple of thousand people, once
prosperous from its marble quarries, is of an imposing size and architectural
grandeur. And they apparently had lots
of spare marble slabs lying about to give their village edifice a whiff of the
Parthenon. In the budgets and tax
assessments of how many of our American communities today does the public
library make a significant appearance?
Should you happen to think, as I do, that the much touted and very real
“threat to our democracy” lies principally in an apathetic and often shockingly
underinformed electorate, there might be some food for thought here.
The modern library, while continuous with its ancient and medieval origins, is truly the product of the invention of mechanical printing and its continuous refinement over a period of nearly five hundred years. Though I greatly admire librarians—those of the present no less than those of the past—I would hate to be one. For we have arrived at another Copernican moment—in this instance I properly should say Gutenbergian—at which human ingenuity and technological prowess once again challenge our most fundamental concepts of knowledge creation and knowledge preservation. If it comes to be that the contents of an entire floor of the Widener Library at Harvard can be and actually is securely and accessibly preserved in some easily duplicated electronic device the size of your passport, we are in a new place. Just what that place is does remain to be seen.
* The huge edition of the Lettres de Peiresc, ed. Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, 7 vols. (Paris, 1888–98) is but a part of his epistolary output.
