Jerome lectures ;

The debates over teaching evolution and/or creationism in the public schools are striking evidence of the tensions between a biblical and a philosophical-scientific explanation of the origins of the universe and the human race. To make historical sense of such debates and those tensions, it is essential to put them into context. For most of the past twenty centuries, that context has been supplied by the relation (or "counterpoint") between two monumental texts: the Timaeus of Plato and the Book of Genesis. In What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? Jaroslav Pelikan examines the origins of this counterpoint. He reviews the central philosophical issues of origins as posed in classical Rome by Lucretius and then proceeds to an examination of each of the two texts with Plato representing Athens and Moses representing Jerusalem. He then follows the three most important case studies of the counterpoint - in the Jewish philosophical theology of Alexandria, in the Christian thought of Constantinople, and in the intellectual foundations of the Western Middle Ages represented by Catholic Rome, where Timaeus would be the only Platonic dialogue in general circulation. Pelikan's study leads to original findings that deal with Christian doctrine in the period of the church fathers, including the Three Cappadocians (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa) in the East, and in the West, Ambrose, Augustine, and Boethius. All of these vitally important authors addressed the problem of the "counterpoint," and neither they nor these primary texts can become fully intelligible without attention to the central issues being explored here. What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? will be of interest to historians, theologians, and philosophers and to anyone with interest in any of the traditions addressed herein.

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.