Rome Reborn; The Vatican Library & Renaissance Culture

Format is approximately 9 inches by 12 inches. xxvi, 323, [3] pages. Minor cover wear. Illustrated frontis. Illustrations (many in color). Notes. References. Manuscripts and Printed Books from the Vatican Library Listed by Fondi. Index. Preface by James H. Billington. Essay on The Vatican Library by Leonard E. Boyle. Chapters on The Vatican and Its library, The Popes and Humanism, The Ancient City Restored: Archaeology, Ecclesiastical History, and Egyptology, the Recovery of the Exact Science of Antiquity: Mathematics, Astronomy, Geography, Life Sciences and Medicine in the Renaissance World, Music and the Renaissance Papacy: The Papal Choir and the Fondo Cappella Sistina, Eastern Churches and Western Scholarship, and Paper Obelisks: East Asia in the Vatican Vaults. This is a catalog of an exhibition that was held at the Library of Congress, Washing, D.C., Jan. 6--Apr. 30, 1993. This exhibition which this book accompanied was the first in a planned series of exhibitions that the Library of Congress planed to present about great libraries of the world. The catalogues that provide a record of each exhibition were intended to go far beyond the usual descriptions of the artifacts. These books were intended to be distinguished by highly readable scholarly studies, written by leading specialists, of the intellectual, social and cultural environments that created the objects on display. Contributors to this catalogue included: James Hankins, N. M. Swerdlow, Nancy Siraisi, Richard Sherr, Alastair Hamilton, and Howard Goodman. Anthony Thomas Grafton (born 1950) is an American historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also the Director the Program in European Cultural Studies. He is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize. From January 2011 to January 2012, he served as the President of the American Historical Association. After a brief period teaching at Cornell's history department, he was appointed to a position at Princeton University in 1975, where he has subsequently remained. Since January 2007, he has been a co-editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas. Anthony Grafton is noted for his studies of the classical tradition from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, and in the history of historical scholarship. His many books include a study of the scholarship and chronology of Renaissance scholar Joseph Scaliger (2 vols., 1983-1993), and, more recently, studies of Girolamo Cardano as an astrologer (1999) and Leon Battista Alberti (2000). In 1996, he delivered the Triennial E. A. Lowe Lectures at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, speaking on Ancient History in Early Modern Europe. Together with Lisa Jardine, he also co-wrote a revisionist account of the significance of Renaissance education (From Humanism to the Humanities, 1986) and on the marginalia of Gabriel Harvey. He also penned several essay collections, including Defenders of the Text (1991), which deals with the relations between scholarship and science in the early modern period, and, most recently, Worlds Made by Words. His most original and accessible book is The Footnote: A Curious History (1997), a case study of how the marginal footnote developed as a central and powerful tool in the hands of historians.…