A Taste for the Difficult and Abstruse: A Seventeenth-Century Paris Librarian and His Orientalist Network

Gilles Ménage said of Louis Picques, the seventeenth-century Paris librarian and orientalist, that “to be his friend, one had to know Coptic, Egyptian, or Samaritan, or at least speak Arabic”. Picques’s letters show that he had many such friends, corresponding with scholars across Europe and acting as a crucial intermediary in the production of new scholarship. This talk explores Picques’s transnational network through his correspondence, as a lens onto the possibilities and practical challenges of communication between the centers of early modern orientalist learning.

Scholarly Correspondences Among Orientalists during the Early and Late Modern Period as a Historical Source: A Series of Lectures. The object of this lecture series is to bring together scholars and librarians engaged with collections of correspondences and/or include related projects that use appropriate digital tools to map and analyze such corpora. It is hosted by Sabine Schmidtke (NES@IAS) and María Mercedes Tuya (Digital Scholarship@IAS). For additional information on this event and the lecture series visit: https://albert.ias.edu/20.500.12111/8044.