Description
Book SynopsisEmery Bigot's life spans the most brilliant years of seventeenth-century France. He left some six hundred letters addressed to the four corners of literary Europe; among his correspondents, acquaintances, and friends were men of the stature of Jean Chapelain, Nicolaus Heinsius, Charles du Cange, Richard Simon, John Milton, and Gilles Ménage. He travelled widely and was for some forty years at the very centre pf a firmly established, smoothly functioning network of mutual assistance and scholarly information that linked the countries of western Europe. From Uppsala to Venice, from Vienna to Oxford, Leiden, London: a network which quite naturally considered Paris its centre, and whose members represented every interest, very segment of intellectual society. Bigot was also the creator of what was perhaps the most important private library of his era. Yet today he is almost unknown, and his correspondence, scattered widely, has not been examined thoroughly since his death.
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