Synopses & Reviews
Anthony Grafton is erudite and elegant in the style of the best historical writers who make the past come alive for the reader. In a full-scale presentation of the world of scholarship, from the Renaissance to the modern period, Grafton sets before us in three-dimensional detail such seminal figures as Poliziano, Scaliger, Kepler, and Wolf. He calls attention to continuities, moments of crisis, and changes in direction. The central issue in Defenders of the Text is the relation between humanism and science from the mid-fifteenth century to the beginning of the modern period. Treatments of Renaissance humanism in English have emphasized the humanists' commitment to rhetoric, ethics, and politics and have accused the humanists of concentrating on literary matters in preference to investigating the real world via new developments in science, philosophy, and other technical disciplines. This revisionist book demonstrates that humanism was neither a simple nor an impractical enterprise, but worked hand-in-hand with science in developing modern learning. Grafton makes clear that humanism remained an integral and vital part of European culture until the eighteenth century, maintaining a technical component of its own--classical philology--which developed in as rich, varied, and unexpected a way as any other field of European thought. Attention to the text led the humanists to develop a whole range of cools and methods that lent power to science and learning for centuries to come. Grafton shows the continued capacity of classical texts to provoke innovative work in both philology and philosophy, and traces a number of close and important connections between humanism and natural science. His book will be important to intellectual historians, students of the classics and the classical tradition, and historians of early modern science.
Review
A sheer delight--a real feast of intellectual scholarship and a hilarious account of the mannerist fantasia that was the European intellectual scene in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Osywn Murray
Review
Grafton writes with an admirable clarity and zest... The kind of scholarly book that an interested non-specialist can read with pleasure and a sense of intellectual discovery. Times Literary Supplement
Review
This excellent book is a major contribution to scholarship. It is highly original, both in the problems it formulates and in the solutions it offers, acute in its reasoning, and elegant, sharp, and often witty. Washington Post Book World
Review
Grafton writes with enviable lucidity and wit... This [book] will give enormous stimulus and pleasure. Paul Oskar Kristeller - New Criterion
Review
Delightful, fresh, well-written, stimulating, provocative, irreverent, and most informative. [Grafton] has contributed to our understanding of 'the making of the modern mind.' Brian Vickers - Times Higher Education Supplement
Synopsis
This book traces the relationship between humanism and science from the mid-fifteenth century to the beginning of the modern period and demonstrates that humanism was neither a simple nor an impractical enterprise, but worked hand-in-hand with science in developing modern learning.
About the Author
Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University.
Princeton University
Table of Contents
- Introduction: The Humanists Reassessed
- 1. Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts
- 2. The Scholarship of Poliziano and Its Context
- 3. Traditions of Invention and Inventions of Tradition in Renaissance Italy: Annius of Viterbo
- 4. Scaliger’s Chronology: Philology, Astronomy, World History
- 5. Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegiscus
- 6. The Strange Deaths of Hermes and the Sibyls
- 7. Humanism and Science in Rudoiphine Prague: Kepler in Context
- 8. Isaac La Peyrère and the Old Testament
- 9. Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Index