ABSTRACT
The antiquary worked with antiquities, what Bacon called "history defaced, or remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time". Like many of the antiquaries, Peiresc was a polymath; his studies of antiquities took place alongside dissections and telescope-aided observation of the Medicean planets and the first nebula, in the constellation Orion, which he discovered. Joseph Scaliger was the first to perceive that the stories coincided in the history of the Samaritans and Peiresc seized on the implications of this for understanding the relationship between Biblical and classical history. References to Joseph Scaliger in Peiresc's work mark this trail from philology to the broader study of culture. Peiresc's interest in the Samaritans was fired by word received from Girolamo Aleandro in Rome in the late spring of 1628 of plans to publish their Pentateuch in the Paris Polyglot Bible.
