Worlds Made by Words

Anthony Grafton is the author of The Footnote, Defenders of the Text, Forgers and Critics, and Inky Fingers, among other books. The Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University, Emeritus, he writes regularly for the London Review of Books.

Grafton challenges readers to consider the pursuit of scholarship in the twenty-first century by reflecting on its practices and practitioners—from the libraries of the Renaissance to the classrooms of the late nineteenth and twentieth-century universities to the virtual spaces where minds and worlds meet today. Part history, part historiography, part autobiography, this is a manifesto for the future of intellectual history by one of its best practitioners.

• * Acknowledgments * Introduction * A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters * A Humanist Crosses Boundaries: Alberti on Historia and Istoria * A Contemplative Scholar: Trithemius Conjures the Past * The World in a Room: Renaissance Histories of Art and Nature * Where Was Salomon's House? Ecclesiastical History and the Intellectual Origins of Bacon's New Atlantis * Chronology, Controversy, and Community in the Republic of Letters: The Case of Kepler * The Universal Language: Splendors and Sorrows of Latin in the Modern World * Entrepreneurs of the Soul, Impresarios of Learning: The Jesuits * In No Man's Land: Christian Learning and the Jews * The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950--2000 and Beyond * The Messrs. Casaubon: Isaac Casaubon and Mark Pattison * Momigliano's Method and the Warburg Institute: Studies in His Middle Period * The Public Intellectual and the American University: Robert Morss Lovett * The Public Intellectual and the Private Sphere: Arendt and Eichmann at the Dinner Table * Codex in Crisis * Notes * Sources * Index