Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) by John Glassie

great.” Despite this less than enthusiastic assessment, Kircher went on with what has been called his “strange combination of mathematics and biblical languages.” When he wasn’t teaching or studying, he was up in the college tower, working on a project inspired by the Avignon light.
    Kircher set up mirrors at the windows that reflected the sunlight onto the tower’s arched ceiling and walls, where it traced a path across marked astronomical points, constellations, and astrological signs. It was a little like a planetarium, or upside-down sundial, that also indicated the time of day in different locations around the world and helped chart horoscopes. The project became the basis for Kircher’s next book, which was printed a few years later.
    He took up direct observation of the sky as well. All over Europe, educated men (because, again, not many women were given educations) with a sense of curiosity and the money or craftsmanship required to own a telescope were trying to see for themselves what all the fuss was about—why their entire understanding of the universe might have to change. The south of France in particular was already known as a good place to use the astronomical tube. While he was there, Kircher had contact with, and tried to convert, an astronomer and Hebrew scholar named Rabbi Salomon Azubins de Tarascon. He made celestial readings with a traveling student from Danzig named Johannes Hevelius, who was more interested in telescopes than in his family’s brewing business. And while traveling near Aix-en-Provence in the fall of 1632, as Kircher put it, he “fell in with”—or made a point of falling in with—someone who was not merely an astronomer but “the most celebrated man, the greatest patron of letters in all of Europe, a Senator in the Parliament there, Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc.”
    Kircher’s assessment of Peiresc’s status was not far off. The son of a wealthy magistrate with connections to the royal court, Peiresc did occupy his family’s seat in the parliament of Provence, and he was an enthusiastic champion of talented scholars. As a young man, after studying with the Jesuits and training as a lawyer, he traveled around for a while, making associations within Europe’s intellectual and cultural circles. Then he went home to fulfill his political duty, live out the ideals of the Renaissance humanist, and support the general advancement of learning. Dividing his time between his home in Aix and his family’s country estate in Belgentier, near Toulon, Peiresc studied old manuscripts and collected coins, paintings, antiquities, natural curiosities, and zoological specimens. He observed the moons of Jupiter for himself not long after Galileo discovered them, and recorded with precise notation the first sighting of the Orion Nebula. At Belgentier, in addition to growing malvoisie grapes for the bottling of his own wine, he cultivated sixty types of apple, twenty varieties of citron, a dozen sorts of orange, and all kinds of melons, apricots, and olives.
    But Peiresc spent most of his time writing letters. According to his protégé, the mathematician and philosopher Pierre Gassendi, “On those dayes on which the Posts did set forth towards Paris or Rome, he was wont to defer his Supper, till ten or eleven a Clock, and very often, till after mid-night; that he might write more, and larger letters.” After his death, a niece is alleged to have burned some portion of Peiresc’s hand-copied correspondence for heat; even so,
ten thousand
of his letters have survived.
    Peiresc functioned like a hub in a virtual network that came to be called the Republic of Letters, continually exchanging intellectual news and information with a wide circle of scholars, philosophers, and artists across Europe and beyond. His elite status meant that he could be in frequent correspondence with people such as the painter Peter Paul