For the Sake of Learning

It is impossible to study early modern history and not know the name Anthony Grafton. Currently Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he has been based since 1975, Anthony Grafton’s scholarship has received virtually every major award or distinction imaginable. Grafton himself was the winner of the 2002 International Balzan Prize and was president of the American Historical Association in 2011. He holds honorary doctorates from Leiden (2006) and Oxford (2013), among other places. This Festschrift, however, constitutes perhaps a still greater tribute to Grafton’s standing in the late modern Republic of Letters, coming as it does from colleagues, peers and admirers. The work’s size alone (fifty-six essays in two volumes) bears testimony to its honorand’s reputation, as does the fact that it could have been considerably longer still, as Grafton’s former Ph.D. students were not asked to contribute (they held a conference in his honour in May 2015). As far as this reviewer is concerned, this was certainly the right decision—its present size makes the 1,000-word review requested by the EHR’s editors already feel like a hopeless task

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