ABSTRACT
This chapter is mainly based on an analysis of the correspondence between Pastor Jacques Pérard and Cardinal Angelo Maria Querini, bishop of Brescia, which is preserved at the National Library of France in the Department of Italian manuscripts. It integrates insights provided by the erudite and ecumenical correspondence between Pérard and his mentor, Jean-Henry Samuel Formey. This correspondence is kept in the Varnhagen collection of the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, Poland, and in the Nachlass Formey collection of the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. The chapter considers the attempts of Bartolomeo De Felice, a Neapolitan who converted to Calvinism, to involve these learned representatives of the Huguenot diaspora but also those Catholics known as "conciliators" with a common encyclopedic "Christian" project, the Encyclopedia of Yverdon. Pérard and Querini clearly stand out from the militant and antagonistic character of the French Enlightenment. They were part of the tradition of humanistic exchange that the Republic of Letters had been cultivating since the sixteenth century.
