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

Rubens, the cultural patron and bibliophile Cardinal Francesco Barberini, and Francesco’s uncle Maffeo, who in 1623 became Pope Urban VIII. Anything interesting that he sent to his friend Marin Mersenne—a Minim friar in Paris who wrote about theology, math, and music—might be forwarded to, say, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, or the lawyer and amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat, who might send it off to someone else.
    As a modern scholar has described it, the first meeting between Peiresc and Kircher “could not have been very intimate,” since in subsequent letters to others, Peiresc referred to his new acquaintance variously as Balthazar Kilner, Balthazard Kyrner, and Athanase Kirser. But Peiresc was intrigued. Kircher told him that he’d been working on a Latin translation of a rare Arabic manuscript that he had saved from the prince-elector’s library at Mainz before the heretic armies came through. As Peiresc later reported, the document was supposedly written by “Rabbi Barachias Nephi of Babylon” and offered insight into “interpreting and deciphering the hieroglyphic letters” of the ancient Egyptians.
    Like Kircher and many others, Peiresc was fascinated by the notion that the hieroglyphic texts represented very early learning. According to Gassendi, Peiresc’s most prized library possession was a papyrus scroll “all written with Hieroglyphick Letters” that had been “found in a Box at the feet of a certain Mumie.” Peiresc theorized that Coptic, the language of the early Egyptian Christians, might shed light on the workings of the hieroglyphic system. He’d been corresponding with a pair of Capuchin monks in Egypt and working through agents in Cairo to purchase anything he could that was in Coptic or about Coptic.
    Several months after he and Peiresc first met, Kircher sent him a sample from his translation of the mysterious Arabic text. Peiresc wrote that it “made me more hopeful than I used to be of the discovery of things that have been so unknown to Christianity for close to two thousand years.” When the next sample came, he wasn’t
quite
as effusive, but urged Kircher to come for an extended visit and to bring the manuscript with him for Peiresc to see. Kircher was uncharacteristically slow to accept the invitation of such an important person, but finally went to stay for four or five days in the spring of 1633.
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    ALTHOUGH THIN and prone to sickness, fifty-two-year-old Peiresc was a man of “rare courtesie and affability.” During Kircher’s visit Peiresc wrote that he and Gassendi were having “great pleasure in taking him around.” It wasn’t just the three of them: Peiresc kept dozens of cats “by reason of mice,” and when he went outdoors, a servant “waited upon him with an Hand-Canopy, to keep off the Sun-beams.” In his gardens and sunrooms he grew black locust from America, jasmine from Persia, ginger from India, rare vines from Damascus, and one China rose. He owned five telescopes and a large treasure of books, with which Kircher demonstrated his facility with languages.
    There was plenty to discuss (they probably spoke Latin), and these French were sophisticated: They took an empirical, mathematical approach to the study of nature and had pretty much given up on Aristotle. They were generally skeptical, especially when it came to fantastic explanations for physical phenomena. Peiresc had withheld judgment some years before, for example, whenthe bones of a giant were discovered in an ancient tomb; many years later he was able to determine that they actually belonged to an elephant.
    Gassendi and Mersenne had recently been involved in a public feud with a physician, alchemist, astrologist, cosmologist, and Kabbalist named Robert Fludd. Fludd believed in the idea of a “world soul,” invisible harmony between microcosm and macrocosm, the divinity of