Anthony Grafton

What does history look like? How do you draw time? From the most ancient images to the contemporary, the line has served as the central figure in the representation of time. The linear metaphor is ubiquitous in everyday visual representations of time—in almanacs, calendars, charts, and graphs of all sorts. Even our everyday speech is filled with talk of time having a "before" and an "after" or being "long" and "short." The timeline is such a familiar part of our mental furniture that it is sometimes hard to remember that we invented it in the first place. And yet, in its modern form, the timeline is not even 250 years old. The story of what came before has never been fully told, until now. [More at Princeton Press]...

"In this book Anthony Grafton lets us in on one of the great secrets of scholars and intellectuals: although scholars lead solitary lives in order to win independence of mind, they also enjoy the conviviality of sharing a project sustained by common ideals, practices, and institutions. It's like Masonry, but without the secret handshakes. Grafton reveals the microdynamics of the scholarly life through a series of essays on institutions and on scholars ranging from early modern polymaths to modern intellectual historians to American thinkers and writers."--Jacket.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was one of the most exciting figures of the Italian Renaissance. He wrote the first modern treatise on painting, the first modern manual of classical architecture, and a powerful set of "dialogues" about the princely families of Florence. But Alberti also made his own spectacular advances in the art of painting and in engineering, and was responsible for some of the most exciting architectural designs in Italy. In this volume, Renaissance scholar Anthony Grafton offers the biography and cultural history that Alberti has long deserved. It is a compelling portrait of a mysterious and original intellectual.

"Girolamo Cardano was an Italian doctor, natural philosopher, and mathematician who became a best-selling author in Renaissance Europe. He was also a leading astrologer of his day, whose predictions won him access to some of the most powerful people in sixteenth-century Europe. In Cardano's Cosmos, Anthony Grafton invites readers to follow this astrologer's extraordinary career and explore the art and discipline of astrology in the hands of a brilliant practitioner.". "Cardano's astrology, argues Grafton, was a profoundly empirical and highly influential art, one that was integral to the attempts of sixteenth-century scholars to understand their universe and themselves."--BOOK JACKET.

Humanists Alberti, Pico, Bude, and Kepler, all major figures of their time and now major figures in intellectual history, are examined in light of their distinctive ways of reading. Investigating a period of two centuries, Grafton vividly portrays the ways in which book/scholar interactions - and the established traditions that were reflected in these interactions - were part of and helped shape the subjects' humanistic philosophy. The book also indicates how these traditions have implications for the modern literary scene. Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers illustrates the immense variety of humanist readers during the Renaissance. Grafton describes life in the Renaissance library, how the act of reading was shaped by the physical environment, and various folkways of reading during the time. A strong sense of what skilled reading was like in the past is built up through anecdotes, philological analysis, and case studies. Anthony Grafton's latest work will be of immense interest to Renaissance and intellectual historians and philologists, as well as classicists and a broad range of scholars.

"On encountering what he called "the Indies," the Jesuit Jose de Acosta wrote, "Having read what poets and philosophers write of the Torrid Zone, I persuaded myself that when I came to the Equator, I would not be able to endure the violent heat, but it turned out otherwise... What could I do then but laugh at Aristotle's Meteorology and his philosophy?" Acosta's experience echoes that of his fellow travelers to the New World, and it is this experience, with its profound effect on Western culture, that Anthony Grafton charts. Describing an era of exploration that went far beyond geographic bounds, this book shows how the evidence of the New World shook the foundations of the old, upsetting the authority of the ancient texts that had guided Europeans so far afield." "The intellectual shift mapped out here, a movement from book learning to empirical knowledge, did not take place easily or quickly, and Grafton presents it in all its drama and complexity. What he recounts is in effect a war of ideas fought, sometimes unwittingly by mariners, scientists, publishers, scholars, and rulers over one hundred fifty years. He shows us explorers from Cortes and Columbus to Scaliger and Munster, laden with ideas gathered from ancient and medieval texts, in their encounters with the world at large. In colorful vignettes, firsthand accounts, published debates, and copious illustrations, we see these men and their contemporaries trying to make sense of their discoveries as they sometimes confirm, sometimes contest, and finally displace traditional images and notions of the world beyond Europe." "The fundamental cultural revolution that Grafton documents still reverberates in our time. By taking us into this battle of books versus facts, a conflict that has shaped global views for centuries, Grafton allows us to re-experience and understand the Renaissance as it continues to this day."--BOOK JACKET.

"From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe," Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine explore the evolution of education and the liberal arts during the Renaissance, examining how humanism influenced the curriculum and pedagogy of the time. Here's a more detailed overview: The Rise of Humanism: The book traces the emergence of humanism, a philosophical and intellectual movement that emphasized the study of classical literature, history, and rhetoric, as a key force in shaping education. The Studia Humanitatis: Humanists focused on the studia humanitatis (humanistic studies), which included the study of Latin and Ancient Greek literatures, grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. Impact on Education: Grafton and Jardine analyze how humanism transformed education, moving away from a purely theological and scholastic approach to a more secular and human-centered one. The Liberal Arts: The book examines the role of the liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) in this new educational framework. Focus on the Renaissance: The book focuses on the 15th and 16th centuries, a period of significant intellectual and cultural change in Europe. Authors: The book is written by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine.

Information: A Very Short Introduction explores the concept of information, central to modern science and society, from thermodynamics and DNA to our use of the mobile phone and the Internet. It moves from a brief look at the mathematical roots of information — its definition and measurement in ‘bits’ — to its role in genetics, and its social meaning and value, before considering the ethics of information, including issues of ownership, privacy, and accessibility; copyright and open source. This VSI also considers concepts such as ‘Infoglut’ (too much information to process) and the emergence of an information society.

This volume explores religious conversion in late antique and early medieval Europe at a time when the utility of the concept is vigorously debated. Though conversion was commonly represented by ancient and early medieval writers as singular and personally momentous mental events, contributors to this volume find gradual and incomplete social processes lurking behind their words. A mixture of examples and approaches will both encourage a deepening of specialist knowledge and spark new thinking across a variety of sub-fields. The historical settings treated here stretch from the Roman Hellenism of Justin Martyr in the second century to the ninth-century programs of religious and moral correction by resourceful Carolingian reformers. Baptismal orations, funerary inscriptions, Christian narratives about the conversion of stage-performers, a bronze statue of Constantine, early Byzantine ethnographic writings, and re-located relics are among the book's imaginative points of entry. This focused collection of essays by leading scholars, and the afterword by Neil McLynn, should ignite conversations among students of religious conversion and related processes of cultural interaction, diffusion, and change both in the historical sub-fields of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages and well beyond.--provided by publisher.