Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 - Softcover

Grafton, Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674195450 ISBN 13: 9780674195455

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1994

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University, is the author of The Footnote: A Curious History, Defenders of the Text, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, and Forgers and Critics, among other books. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books.

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, Times Literary Supplement

“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.”―Washington Post Book World

“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.”―Paul Oskar Kristeller, New Criterion

“Grafton writes with enviable lucidity and wit... This [book] will give enormous stimulus and pleasure.”―Brian Vickers, Times Higher Education Supplement

“Delightful, fresh, well-written, stimulating, provocative, irreverent, and most informative. [Grafton] has contributed to our understanding of ‘the making of the modern mind.’”―Richard Popkin, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0674195450
• ISBN 13: 9780674195455
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 340