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For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton

2018; The MIT Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/jinh_r_01313

1530-9169

William J. Connell,

Race, History, and American Society

For the Sake of Learning is a splendid two-volume monument to Grafton’s career. Renaissancers are necromancers. Grafton is a master necromancer. Whereas Odysseus dug a trench, poured libations, and sacrificed sheep to speak with the dead, one trusts that Grafton's rites are more prosaic. Yet, possibly sometimes in his dreams, he panics like Odysseus and waves a sword at the horde of souls swarming from Erebus. His interlocutors—Joseph Scaliger, Politian, Battista Guarino, Gerolamo Cardano, Johannes Trithemius, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Guillaume Budé, Justus Lipsius, Lorenzo Valla, Johannes Kepler, Leon Battista Alberti, Isaac Casaubon, Edward Gibbon, Jacques Hardouin-Mansart, Giambattista Vico, John Dee, Athanasius Kircher—are a striving, clamorous crowd. Unlike the singing poets in Dante’s “splendid school” (Inferno 4.94) or the smiling lights in his “wheel” of Christian writers (Paradiso 10.145), Grafton’s men (and men they all are) vie for attention and bristle with hatreds and vices. Their astounding errors, fraudulent scholarship, fanciful dreams, beliefs both orthodox and heretical, and their sometimes abusive manners all serve to illuminate the many crooked paths by which modern philology, experimental science, and history as presently practiced came into being. Grafton’s influence on historical scholarship in the decades before and after 2000 has been remarkable, and the volumes of this Festschrift pay it due tribute.The project, ably edited by Blair and Goeing, begins with a biographical sketch of Grafton written by Blair and Nicholas Popper, followed by a bibliography of Grafton’s writings that fills twenty-seven pages and reads like a Jorge Luis Borges ficción. Each of the fifty-six essays, distributed among seven Parts and an Epilogue, responds to subjects or themes that Grafton has addressed over the course of his career. Part I, about “Scaliger and Casaubon” includes substantial treatment of the two men’s correspondences, a new letter from Sarpi to Casaubon, a fascinating look at a second-rate Hebraist (Arnaldus Pontacus) who wandered onto Scaliger’s turf, an essay about portraits of Scaliger as an orientalist, and a critical edition of Scaliger’s brief treatise about the apocryphal books of the Bible.“Knowledge Communities” are the subject of the second part, which includes essays about early modern street culture; the networks of a physician (Baudouin Rousse), of a theatrical family (the Andreini), and of Athanasius Kircher; and the politics of Francis Bacon’s reading of others, and of him by them. “Scholarship and Religion” covers a biography of Mohammed by Pomponio Leto that was never intended as a biography, Luther’s marginalia in his copy of Desiderius Erasmus’ Annotations of the New Testament (1516), the preparation post-Trent of a new Vulgate and a new Septuagint, demonology and perception, John Selden’s reception in Germany, animal imagery in connection with the Popish Plot, Lutheran Islamophiles, and a continuing role in modernity for what the Romans called their rex sacrorum (king of the sacred rites).“Cultures of Collecting” includes studies of the books owned by early Christian writers, the Greek texts named in a dialogue by Angelo Decembrio, the rich library of Hernando Colón, the recovery of a volume by Conrad Gessner, the sixteenth century’s production of “metadata” for information searches, lettering in the Vatican Library, the Hebrew encyclopedia of Pinḥas Hurwitz, and ornithology in the Dresden Kunstkammer. “Learned Practices” comprises pieces about graphic visualization, a rhetorical manuscript from Padua, Cardano’s mistaken horoscope of Regiomontanus (of all people!), the Lingua Adamica, Catholic censorship of several of Petrarch’s sonnets, Tommaso Campanella and Niccolò Machiavelli, a role for God and spirits in the work of Robert Boyle and those around him, and nineteenth-century scrapbooking.“Approaches to Antiquity” offers essays that discuss a poem written circa 1400 that has King Arthur carousing, oddly, in Viterbo; humanists’ use of terms for relics when treating codices; Cyriac of Ancona as a political theorist; the reception of Diodorus Siculus in the sixteenth century; Renaissance views of Marcus Aurelius; Marcus again but this time in seventeenth-century Antwerp; Jesuit natural theology; Henry Savile’s Euclid; nature vs. nurture in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762) and contemporary texts; and the reception of Friedrich August Wolf ’s reading of Homer in England.“Uses of Historiography” comprises essays about the changing meanings of the word classic, the histories and legends around French pilgrim shrines, an intriguing forger in eighteenth-century Bologna, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and antiquarianism, the Egyptologist Georg Ebers, Friedrich Nietzsche and the demise of Quellenforschung (the study of sources), Theodor Mommsen’s deeply cautious approach to inscriptions, and Mark Twain’s “Memory Builder.” The Epilogue is a reconsideration, by the late Lisa Jardine, of a famous essay that she wrote with Grafton in Past Present1; it concludes with a valuable account by Jacob Soll of Grafton’s evolving method.It is amusing, at this distance in time, to remember what many senior scholars were saying about Grafton in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite their admiration for his erudition, they doubted his work would find interested readers. Many said that the reception of classical antiquity was a dry and narrow subject and others that studying the classics of Greek and Latin literature was an elitist activity serving to perpetuate a stifling class system. Some thought that Grafton’s efforts to entwine philology with the history of science seemed strained and artificial. That the history of scholarship is mere “Bauchnabelbeachtung” (navel gazing) was another dart that was thrown.For the Sake of Learning is an indispensable guide to Grafton’s sprawling oeuvre. The contributions to the two volumes indicate the extent to which his once lonely efforts came to inspire the generation of early modern scholars studying what now goes by the name of “information history.” As a graduate student with my ear to the ground, I well remember the first time that I heard Grafton praised unequivocally. In 1985, Peter Brown and I walked around the Princeton campus discussing a paper that I had written in the last seminar that Brown offered at Berkeley before leaving for Princeton. After inquiring about my future interests, Brown suggested that I read Grafton’s article (written with Jardine) on “The School of Guarino.”2 It was an excellent suggestion, and I’ve been reading Grafton ever since—like so many others.