Anthony Grafton - Works

Works

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 profound study of the scholarship and chronology of the foremost classical scholar of the late Renaissance, Joseph Scaliger (2 vols, 1983–1993), a revisionist account (with Lisa Jardine) of the significance of Renaissance education (From Humanism to the Humanities, 1986), and, more recently, studies of Girolamo Cardano as an astrologer (1999) and Leon Battista Alberti (2000).

The best introduction to his preoccupation with the relations between scholarship and science in the early modern period is perhaps (still) Defenders of the Text (1991). In some ways his most original and accessible book is The Footnote: A curious history (1997; published in German as Die Tragischen Ursprünge der deutschen Fußnote), a case study in what might be called the history of history, from below.

He also writes on a wide variety of topics for The New Republic, The American Scholar, and The New York Review of Books. He owns a bookwheel which he keeps at hand in his home.

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Famous quotes containing the word works:

    That man’s best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature’s infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.
    Lydia M. Child (1802–1880)

    They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.
    Bible: Hebrew Psalms, 107:23-4.

    Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.
    Paul Valéry (1871–1945)