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38 results

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  • The 2019 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Winged Eye at Work: Leon Battista Alberti Surveys Old St. Peter's

  • Anthony Grafton
  • Journal:
    Renaissance Quarterly / Volume 73 / Issue 4 / Winter 2020
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    22 January 2021, pp. 1137-1178
    Print publication:
    Winter 2020

  • 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 church. His ideas seemingly shaped the ways in which Pope Pius II restored the basilica, and his example shows that serious efforts to trace the history of Christianity long predated the Reformation.

  • 3 - Learned Reading in the Atlantic Colonies: How Humanist Practices Crossed the Atlantic

  • Edited by Ulinka Rublack, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Protestant Empires
    Published online:
    20 August 2020
    Print publication:
    10 September 2020, pp 82-98

  • Summary

    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 vivid annotations traced his progress in fields as diverse as Arabic philology and botany, recorded striking incidents in his life as collector and scholar, memorialized his creation of bibliophilic and scholarly networks, and provided the foundation for the learned essays that he published in both American and European periodicals – all characteristic ways of using books in the world of contemporary European scholarship. Drawing on the evidence of Logan’s books, papers, and his writings, and comparing Logan’s practices to those of the Mathers, the Winthrops, Francis Daniel Pastorius and other contemporaries, this essay offers a case study in the migration of Protestant late humanism to the English colonies in North America.

Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices
  • A Global Comparative Approach
  • Edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most
  • Published online:
    05 September 2016
    Print publication:
    07 September 2016
  • 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. This volume shows how much is learned when historians of scholarship, like contemporary historians of science, focus on earlier scholars' practices, and when Western scholarly traditions are treated as part of a much larger, cross-cultural inquiry.

What Was History?
  • The Art of History in Early Modern Europe
  • Anthony Grafton
  • Published online:
    05 December 2013
    Print publication:
    29 March 2012
  • 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 these works were written, why they attained so much insight – and why, in the centuries that followed, most scholars gradually forgot that they had existed. Elegant and accessible, What Was History? is a deliberate evocation of E. H. Carr's celebrated Trevelyan Lectures, What Is History?.

  • 4 - Death of a genre

  • Anthony Grafton, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    What Was History?
    Published online:
    05 December 2013
    Print publication:
    29 March 2012, pp 189-254

  • Summary

    How does a tradition end? Sometimes, like a language, a tradition dies with the last person who embodies it. After Samuel Johnson read James Boswell's Latin thesis for the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, he remarked with characteristic bluntness, “Ruddiman is dead.” Thomas Ruddiman, printer, publisher, Latinist, and librarian of the Faculty, had corrected the Latin of the young advocates' works before they were formally submitted. Now he was gone – and with him the tradition of precise Latin scholarship that had inspired Ruddiman's edition of the works of George Buchanan. Scottish Neo-Latin died with Ruddiman.

    The crowd-pleasing death scene of the ars historica, by contrast, seems impossible to identify with that of a single individual or even the publication of a single deadly critical book. It is not hard to provide a terminus ante quem. On 22 December 1766, the Prorector and Senate of the University of Göttingen celebrated the opening of a Historical Institute, under the directorship of Johann Christian Gatterer, professor ordinarius of history. This institute promised the young scholars and aristocrats who flocked to the university the most up-to-date historical training in Europe – a training that Friedrich August Wolf applied to the creation of Altertumswissenschaft, and Wilhelm von Humboldt to the invention of that sublime product of German administrative ingenuity, the researchcentred University of Berlin. The great classical scholar Christian Gottlob Heyne celebrated the institute's creation in a powerful address.

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