The hope of religious restoration could demand more than reforming a church. Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) believed that the divisions among peoples might be overcome by recovering the truth they had once shared. The task sent him into unfamiliar languages and manuscripts, and his travels in the Ottoman world widened the range of books he could bring to European readers. Learning about other societies belonged to an effort to explain how humanity had become divided and might be reunited.
Postel’s abilities were substantial. Languages that blocked other scholars gave him access to further accounts of the ancient world, and the prospect of finding agreement across them made the labour worth undertaking. Yet he approached these sources with strong expectations about their common beginning. Difference could become evidence of something lost, rather than a reason to question whether the original agreement had existed.
That confidence helped sustain his defence of the false Berosus published by Annius of Viterbo (c. 1432–1502). The supposed Babylonian history connected later peoples to biblical ancestors and supplied relationships that the surviving record could not otherwise establish. Postel’s willingness to defend it cannot be explained by a simple shortage of learning. He possessed more learning than many of its critics and still gave the text a place in the history he hoped to recover.
His work nevertheless created opportunities for conclusions he would not have welcomed. Readers studied the languages he taught and consulted the manuscripts he made accessible without always accepting his account of what they meant. Among them was the young scholar who would become one of Europe’s most exacting critics of ancient chronology. His encouragement to learn remained valuable to a pupil who came to distrust the history he taught.