Anthony Grafton is a preeminent historian of early modern Europe, renowned for his profound engagement with the intellectual and cultural history of the era. His scholarship meticulously investigates the methods by which knowledge was created, shared, and reshaped by scholars and artists. Grafton's characteristic style often explores the often-overlooked details and marginalia within historical texts to reveal larger intellectual movements. His work provides essential insights into the development of ideas and the intricate nature of the early modern world, offering a crucial understanding of the roots of contemporary thought.
The book explores the transformative role of Renaissance antiquarians in shaping art and knowledge through their discoveries. Highlighting significant finds like Livy's remains and Nero's Golden House, it delves into the methods used by these scholars and their collaborations with alchemists and craftspeople. The narrative reveals how the revival of ancient artifacts not only inspired new artistic and scholarly pursuits but also intertwined with religious devotion, challenging the perception of antiquarianism as purely secular.
"Anthony Grafton explores the art and influence of an opaque historical figure: the magus, or learned magician. A distinctive intellectual type in Renaissance Europe, magi contributed to the humanistic currents of the time and had a transformative impact on public life, influencing advances in sculpture, painting, engineering, and other fields."--
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 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.
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.
Behind every great writer is a great editor—so goes the maxim that writers abhor and publishers adore. The struggle between writer and publisher is as long and fraught as the history of print itself. As distinguished historian Anthony Grafton reveals in The Culture of Correction, even during the Renaissance authors fumed and cursed over what became of their work in the printing house as it was prepared for publication. In this engaging study, Grafton re-creates the practices of professional correctors in the early printing workshops—the “poor devils” of literature whose work extended far beyond the specific task of proof correction—and the authors and printers alongside them. He pays particular attention to surviving manuscripts and the printed books that correctors used in order to explore what the traces they left behind can tell us about authorship and the role of the publisher in Renaissance Europe. This highly illustrated book represents the most groundbreaking research in the growing area of scholarship on the history of the book.
