Anthony Grafton Books

Elegant and accessible, this book is a powerful and imaginative exploration of themes in the history of European ideas.

Renowned historian Anthony Grafton invites us to see the scholars of early modern Europe as laborers. Bookish but hardly divorced from physical tasks, they were artisans of script and print. Drawing new connections between text and craft, publishing and intellectual history, Grafton shows that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands.

The close links between forgery and criticism throughout history In Forgers and Critics, Anthony Grafton provides a wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship. Labeling forgery the "criminal sibling" of criticism, Grafton describes a panorama of remarkable individuals--forgers from classical Greece through the recent past--who produced a variety of splendid triumphs of learning and style, as well as the scholarly detectives who honed the tools of scholarship in attempts to unmask these skillful fakers. In the process, Grafton discloses the extent, the coherence, and the historical interest of two significant and tightly intertwined strands in the Western intellectual tradition.

This engaging history reorients the West through a vivid narrative aimed at beginners. Grafton and Bell explore the West's quest for order in politics, society, and culture, presenting a balanced, chronological account. Enhanced by digital resources, "The West" offers a fresh foundation for teaching Western Civilizations.

This engaging history book reorients the West through a vivid narrative aimed at beginners. Grafton and Bell explore the West's quest for order in politics, society, and culture, presenting a balanced, chronological account. Enhanced by digital resources, it offers a fresh foundation for teaching Western Civilizations.

This book uses broad synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea in Roman Palestine. It explores the dialectic between intellectual history and history of the book and expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship.

The author of The Footnote reflects on scribes, scholars, and the work of publishing during the golden age of the book.From Francis Bacon to Barack Obama, thinkers and political leaders have denounced humanists as obsessively bookish and allergic to labor. In this celebration of bookmaking in all its messy and intricate detail, renowned historian Anthony Grafton invites us to see the scholars of early modern Europe as diligent workers. Meticulously illuminating the physical and mental labors that fostered the golden age of the book--the compiling of notebooks, copying and correction of texts and proofs, preparation of copy--he shows us how the exertions of scholars shaped influential books, treatises, and forgeries.Inky Fingers ranges widely, tracing the transformation of humanistic approaches to texts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and examining the simultaneously sustaining and constraining effects of theological polemics on sixteenth-century scholars. Grafton draws new connections between humanistic traditions and intellectual innovations, textual learning and craft knowledge, manuscript and print.Above all, Grafton makes clear that the nitty-gritty of bookmaking has had a profound impact on the history of ideas--that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands.

In this compact study of the Renaissance and Reformation, Eugene F. Rice, Jr. draws together the main lines of change that account for a period of rapid transition from medieval civilization to early modern. From a chapter on science, technology, and the voyages of exploration, Professor Rice goes on to examine economic expansion within Europe, Renaissance society and the new humanist culture, the rise of the sovereign state, and, ultimately, the clash between the established Church and the Protestant reformers.

Devoted entirely to the history of the footnote, this quirky but academic study emphasizes the importance of the footnote in offering empirical support for the stories we live by. Its own story is neither so simple nor so reliable as it might seem, the footnote being the creation of a varied and talented group which includes almost as many philosophers as historians. It numbers among its celebrated practitioners Swift, Pope, Gibbon, Rank, Hume and Hegel.