Anthony Grafton
Biographic Data
| ID | 508337 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anthony Grafton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anthony |
| FAMILY NAME | Grafton |
| SIGNATURE | GRAFTON A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 105 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 322 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 102 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Toward a Conjectural History of Conjectural Histories
Most intellectual historians use the term "conjectural history" to designate a new form of speculative history created in eighteenth-century Scotland by Adam Smith and a few others. These writers traced the development of human society and culture through conjectural reasoning based on philosophers' views about human nature and travelers' accounts of "primitive" peoples. Their work had a deep impact on eighteenth-century philology: it helped to s…
The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag, written by Peter Burke
Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa
The Art of Discovery: Digging into the Past in Renaissance Europe
Art of Discovery: Digging into the Past in Renaissance Europe
A Florentine Looks at Florence: Piero Cennini on the Baptistery and the Feast of St John
In 1475, the Florentine humanist Piero Cennini sent a friend a letter in Latin, in which he described in detail both the Florentine baptistery and the yearly celebration of the feast of St John in late June. This article presents a full text and English translation of the document, with an introduction and notes. Cennini, a scribe and scholar, belonged to a distinguished family of Florentine goldsmiths, with whose members he collaborated on an ed…
Eloge: Noel Swerdlow (1941-2021)
Isaac La Peyrère. Praeadamitae – Systema theologicum
Antiquarians in Action: Barbara Furlotti. Antiquities in Motion: From Excavation Sites to Renaissance Collections; Christine Smith and Joseph F. O’Connor. Eyewitness to Old St. Peter’s: Maffeo Vegio’s…
Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe
Learned Reading in the Atlantic Colonies: How Humanist Practices Crossed the Atlantic
James Logan (1674–1751) led many lives. The son of a schoolmaster, he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1699 as William Penn’s secretary. The fur trade made him rich. His political career included stints as mayor of Philadelphia, chief justice, and acting governor of Pennsylvania. Above all, he pursued books and learning, systematically building a collection of almost 4,000 books in fields from classical scholarship to Newtonian physics. His profuse and…
We Will Remember Zion
This essay offers reminiscences of a long scholarly career and friendship with David Quint. With vivid descriptions of intellectual engagements and pedagogical explorations, it celebrates the arc of a career and its range
The 2019 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Winged Eye at Work: Leon Battista Alberti Surveys Old St. Peter's
Leon Battista Alberti based his treatise “On the Art of Building” on close examination of a great many buildings. His survey of Old St. Peter's was especially thorough. He not only investigated the structure, but also ransacked written sources to re-create the church's original décor and to reconstruct the ways in which early popes had celebrated Mass and delivered sermons. Like Lorenzo Valla, he offered a suggestive and polemical history of the …
Renaissance Readers of Homer’s Ancient Readers
CHAPTER Seven. Renaissance Readers of Homer's Ancient Readers
Formations of Belief: Historical Approaches to Religion and the Secular
Forgers and Critics, New Edition: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship
Passing The Book: Cultures of Reading in the Winthrop Family, 1580-1730
Large numbers of annotated books that belonged to members of the Winthrop family — which included the founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other individuals prominent in the early modern British Atlantic world — survive in libraries across the Northeastern United States. The notes in their margins reveal how the Winthrops responded to a vast array of material, from alchemical recipes to political tracts. Once deciphered and compa…
Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach
In this collection of richly documented case studies, experts in many textual traditions examine the ways in which important texts were preserved, explicated, corrected, and used for a variety of purposes. The authors describe the multiple ways in which scholars in different cultures have addressed some of the same tasks, revealing both radical differences and striking similarities in textual practices across space, time and linguistic borders. T…
Humanist Philologies: Texts, Antiquities, and Their Scholarly Transformations in the Early Modern West
Christian Hebraism and the Rediscovery of Hellenistic Judaism
Chronologia est unica historiae lux: How Glarean studied and taught the chronology of the ancient world
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Collectors’ Knowledge: What Is Kept, What Is Discarded / Aufbewahren oder wegwerfen: wie Sammler entscheiden
Drawing on case studies from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, covering Europe and beyond, Collectors’ Knowledge: What is Kept, What is Discarded investigates how knowledge was acquired, organized and sometimes lost. It examines collections of texts and objects—libraries, textbooks, miscellanies, commonplace books, data collections pertaining to historical events, encyclopedias, royal and ducal treasures, curiosity cabinets, galleries an…
Heinrich Glarean's Books: The Intellectual World of a Sixteenth-Century Musical Humanist
This collection of essays investigates the work of Heinrich Glarean, one of the most influential humanists and music theorists of the sixteenth century. For the first time, Glarean's musical writings, including his masterwork the Dodekachordon, are considered in the wider context of his work in a variety of disciplines such as musicology, history, theology and geography. Contributors reference books from Glarean's private library, including rare …
What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe
From the late fifteenth century onwards, scholars across Europe began to write books about how to read and evaluate histories. These pioneering works grew from complex early modern debates about law, religion and classical scholarship. Anthony Grafton's book is based on his Trevelyan Lectures of 2005, and it proves to be a powerful and imaginative exploration of some central themes in the history of European ideas. Grafton explains why so many of…
Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy
STUDIED FOR ACTION”: HOW GABRIEL HARVEY READ HIS LIVY Get access Lisa Jardine, Lisa Jardine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Anthony Grafton Anthony Grafton Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 129, Issue 1, November 1990, Pages 30–78, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/129.1.30 Published: 01 November 1990
The footnote: A Curious History
Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography
One of the most significant controversies in the history of biology is that dealing with the theories of the origin of life.Do all organisms arise from organisms or can life be generated spontaneously?These questions have been asked for centuries.Involving, as they do, religious and metaphysical beliefs, the resultant arguments have been heated and prolonged.Professor Farley disputes the usual idea that the debate in England, France, and Germany …
The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950-2000 and Beyond
The History of Ideas:Precept and Practice, 1950–2000 and Beyond Anthony Grafton In the middle years of the twentieth century, the history of ideas rose like a new sign of the zodiac over large areas of American culture and education. In those happy days, Dwight Robbins, the president of a fashionable progressive college, kept "copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine—a little magazine—that had no name"…
Natural particulars: Nature and the disciplines in Renaissance Europe
Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts: Comments on Some Commentaries
In autumn, 1465, two humanists agreed to have a battle. Lorenzo Guidetti was a disciple and friend of Cristoforo Landino, the most prominent teacher of rhetoric in the Florentine Studio. Buonaccorso Massari was a pupil of a less famous master, Giovanni Pietro of Lucca. Naturally, Massari began the fight, with all the pretended friendliness and genuine desire to insert knives in backs that characterize the intellectual at his deadliest. Massari ha…
New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery
The Horoscope of the Foundation of Rome
Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus
Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline
From Strauchius I imbibed the elements of Chronology: the tables of Helvicus and Anderson, the annals of Usher and Prideaux distinguished the connection of events, and I engraved the multitude of names and dates in a clear and indelible series. But in the discussion of the first ages I overleaped the bounds of modesty and use. In my childish balance I presumed to weigh the systems of Scaliger and Petavius, of Marsham and Newton which I could seld…
Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800
Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. I: Textual Criticism and Exegesis
New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery
Journal Article New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. By Anthony Grafton with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. xii, 282 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-61875-0.) Get access Carla Rahn Phillips Carla Rahn Phillips University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minnesota Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81, …
Some Uses of Eclipses in Early Modern Chronology
Historical chronology is the discipline that establishes the dates of events and reconstructs the calendars used in ancient, medieval, and early modern times. Traditional accounts state that Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) created this field by combining philological with astronomical data and techniques. But the celestial phenomena most relevant to chronology are solar and lunar eclipses. From antiquity onwards, astrologers saw these as ominous and …
The Importance of Being Printed
Historia and Istoria: Alberti's Terminology in Context
The Footnote from De Thou to Ranke
Footnotes seem to rank among the most colorless and uninteresting features of historical practice. In fact, however, footnoting practices have varied widely, over time and across space, between individuals and among national disciplinary communities. Little clarity has prevailed in the discussion of the purpose footnotes serve; even less attention has been devoted to the development they have undergone. This essay sketches the history of the foot…
Reassessing Humanism and Science
The notion that and are inevitably opposed to one another in their content, methods, and goals, has multiple origins which reinforce its currency. While one can trace the fear that scientism would undermine traditional morality and mythology back to the Athens of Aristophanes,' the more relevant source for the twentieth-century sense of a gulf between the notorious two cultures2 lies no doubt, as Owen Hannaway argues below, in the segregation in …
Kepler as a Reader
Technical Chronology and Astrological History in Varro, Censorinus and Others
Technical chronology establishes the structure of calendars and the dates of events; it is, as it were, the foundation of history, particularly ancient history. The chronologer must know enough philology to interpret texts and enough astronomy to compute the dates of celestial phenomena, above all eclipses, which alone provide absolute dates. Joseph Scaliger, so we are told, was the first to master and apply this range of technical skills: Of the…
Humanism and the School of Guarino: A Problem of Evaluation
A. T. Grafton, L. Jardine; HUMANISM AND THE SCHOOL OF GUARINO: A PROBLEM OF EVALUATION*, Past & Present, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 August 1982, Pages 51–80, ht
The 2019 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Winged Eye at Work: Leon Battista Alberti Surveys Old St. Peter's
Leon Battista Alberti based his treatise “On the Art of Building” on close examination of a great many buildings. His survey of Old St. Peter's was especially thorough. He not only investigated the structure, but also ransacked written sources to re-create the church's original décor and to reconstruct the ways in which early popes had celebrated Mass and delivered sermons. Like Lorenzo Valla, he offered a suggestive and polemical history of the …
Passing The Book: Cultures of Reading in the Winthrop Family, 1580-1730
Large numbers of annotated books that belonged to members of the Winthrop family — which included the founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other individuals prominent in the early modern British Atlantic world — survive in libraries across the Northeastern United States. The notes in their margins reveal how the Winthrops responded to a vast array of material, from alchemical recipes to political tracts. Once deciphered and compa…
Apocalypse in the stacks? The research library in the age of Google
What is the research library in the age of Google? Dr. Anthony Grafton provides the perspective of a humanist scholar on recent changes in research libraries that have been brought about by increased digitization. By examining changes that have occurred over the last forty years in the way that scholars conduct their research and where the library fits in, Grafton sees four crises that today’s academic libraries must face: financial, spatial, use…
History's postmodern fates
Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline
From Strauchius I imbibed the elements of Chronology: the tables of Helvicus and Anderson, the annals of Usher and Prideaux distinguished the connection of events, and I engraved the multitude of names and dates in a clear and indelible series. But in the discussion of the first ages I overleaped the bounds of modesty and use. In my childish balance I presumed to weigh the systems of Scaliger and Petavius, of Marsham and Newton which I could seld…
From Politian to Pasquali
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626-1660
Rhetoric, Philology and Egyptomania in the 1570s: J. J. Scaliger's Invective against M. Guilandinus's Papyrus
The Importance of Being Printed
Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries
Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, Vol. IV. Ed. F. Edward Cranz, with Paul Oskar Kristeller. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1980. xxii + 524 pp. $59.95. - Volume 35 Issue 1
Humanism and the School of Guarino: A Problem of Evaluation
A. T. Grafton, L. Jardine; HUMANISM AND THE SCHOOL OF GUARINO: A PROBLEM OF EVALUATION*, Past & Present, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 August 1982, Pages 51–80, ht
Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus
The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and Encyclopedism
In 1713 and 1715 Johann Burkhard Mencke subjected the scholars of the Holy Roman Empire to a searching examination. They failed it. His two speeches “On the Charlatanry of the Learned”—best sellers wherever they were not banned—ridiculed the minds and the mores of the polyhistors with equal zest. Mencke anatomized their love for overblown titles: Today ... you see many demanding to be called Clarissimus who are absolutely unknown outside the wall…
Censorinus' Aureolus Libellus - Nicolaus Sallmann: Censorini de die natali liber ad Q. Caerellium. Accedit anonymi cuiusdam epitoma disciplinarum (frag-mentum Censorini). (Bibliotheca scriptorum graec…
Censorinus' Aureolus Libellus - Nicolaus Sallmann: Censorini de die natali liber ad Q. Caerellium. Accedit anonymi cuiusdam epitoma disciplinarum (frag-mentum Censorini). (Bibliotheca scriptorum graecorum et romanorum Teubneriana.) Pp. xxxviii + 106; 2 plates. Leipzig: Teubner, 1983. - Volume 35 Issue 1
Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts: Comments on Some Commentaries
In autumn, 1465, two humanists agreed to have a battle. Lorenzo Guidetti was a disciple and friend of Cristoforo Landino, the most prominent teacher of rhetoric in the Florentine Studio. Buonaccorso Massari was a pupil of a less famous master, Giovanni Pietro of Lucca. Naturally, Massari began the fight, with all the pretended friendliness and genuine desire to insert knives in backs that characterize the intellectual at his deadliest. Massari ha…
Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance . Jerry H. Bentley
Technical Chronology and Astrological History in Varro, Censorinus and Others
Technical chronology establishes the structure of calendars and the dates of events; it is, as it were, the foundation of history, particularly ancient history. The chronologer must know enough philology to interpret texts and enough astronomy to compute the dates of celestial phenomena, above all eclipses, which alone provide absolute dates. Joseph Scaliger, so we are told, was the first to master and apply this range of technical skills: Of the…
Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. I: Textual Criticism and Exegesis
Holland without Huizinga: Dutch Visual Culture in the Seventeenth Century
Prolegomena to Homer 1795
Greek Chronography in Roman Epic: The Calendrical Date of the Fall of Troy in the Aeneid
The last chapter of Politian's first Miscellanea dealt with the amica silentia lunae through which the Greeks sailed back to Troy ( Aen. 2.255). He argued that the phrase should not be taken literally, as a statement that Troy fell at the new moon, but in an extended sense, as a poetic indication that the moon had not yet risen when the Greeks set sail. This reading had one merit: it explained how Virgil's moon could be silent while the Greeks we…
The Horoscope of the Foundation of Rome
From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe
From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe
The Education for Those Who Are Free
F. A. Wolf: Prolegomena to Homer (1795)
From Humanism to the Humanities
Prolegomena to Homer, 1795
The subjects Wolf addressed have dominated Homeric scholarship for almost two centuries. Especially important were his analyses of the history of writing and of the nature of Alexandrian scholarship and his consideration of the composition of the Homeric poems--which set the terms for the analyst/unitarian controversy. His exploration of the history of the transmission of the text in antiquity opened a new field of research and transformed concep…
Humanists and Sewers: A Comment and a Coda
Sometime in the later 1590s Justus Lipsius and one of his Louvain students had a nice conversation about sewers. The student thought the topic comic and stifled a giggle, but Lipsius soon set him straight. The sewers of ancient Rome had been as physically imposing as any other great Roman artifact. Moreover—and more important to the student of history—they were directly linked with the other artifacts and institutions that had provided the materi…
Art (61 works) · History (56 works) · Philosophy (54 works) · Classics (43 works) · Art history (35 works) · Literature (30 works) · History (29 works) · Political science (29 works) · Law (24 works) · Classics (23 works)