Making of the Humanities

Rens Bod is Vici-Laureate and Full Professor in Computational Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. Books: Beyond Grammar (CSLI/Cambridge University Press), Probabilistic Linguistics (MIT Press), Data-Oriented Parsing (University of Chicago Press), A New History of the Humanities (Oxford University Press). Jaap Maat is Professor in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Books: Philosophical Languages in the Seventeenth Century: Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibniz (Synthese Historical Library, Kluwer, 2004), George Dalgarno on Universal Language (Oxford University Press, 2001). Thijs Weststeijn is a researcher and lecturer at the department of Art History of the University of Amsterdam.

Anja-Silvia Goeing, in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Fall 2012): 'The strength of this book lies in the way it connects = well-known profiles to lesser-known figures, and in its discussion of those fields, including the visual arts, linguistics, and history, that had scarcely been defined among the artes liberales in the humanism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As this book shows, the significance of these disciplines for the academy grew immensely in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The chapters examine the history of disciplines that today are regarded as separate and distinct. = The purpose of this book is to answer two questions: first, the question of what - what kind of organizing principles did academic knowledge deploy in different early modern settings?; and second, the question of how - how did academic knowledge in Europe come to be what it is in modern times? The authors' focus on the non-sciences is intended to fill a lack that the editors see when compared to the vast and existing literature written about the history of the sciences. The book is therefore most valuable to academics studying the history of European academic knowledge.'

• Table of Contents - 6 Introduction: Historiography of the Humanities - 8 I. The Humanities versus the Sciences - 16 How Comparative Should a Comparative History of the Humanities Be? - 18 Bridging the Gap - 40 Music as Science and as Art - 60 II. The Visual Arts as Liberal Arts - 74 Representing the World - 76 Ficino, Diacceto and Michelangelo’s - 108 ‘Signs that Signify by Themselves’ - 134 III. Humanism and Heresy - 162 Giordano Bruno and Metaphor - 164 ‘In Erudition There Is No Heresy’ - 178 IV. Language and Poetics - 198 Humanism in the Classroom, a Reassessment - 200 Origins and Principles - 232 Transitional Texts and Emerging Linguistic Self-Awareness - 250 V. Linguists and Logicians - 262 The Changing Relations between Grammar, Rhetoric and Music in the Early Modern Period - 264 The Artes Sermocinales in Times of Adversity - 284 VI. Philology and Philosophy - 298 Manuscript Hunting and the Challenge of Textual Variance in Late Seventeenth-Century Icelandic Studies - 300 Spinoza in the History of Biblical Scholarship - 314 The ‘Rules of Critique’ - 328 VII. The History of History - 350 Framing a New Mode of Historical Experience - 352 Philosophy’s Shadow - 368 Contributors - 386 List of Figures - 392 Index - 396