Volume 56, Number 19 · December 3, 2009
Fighting over History
By Keith Thomas
What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe
by Anthony Grafton
Cambridge University Press, 319 pp., $73.00; $23.99 (paper)
Anthony Grafton is one of the world's most gifted historical scholars. His field is the history of learning, particularly the learning embodied in the philological, historical, and scientific literature of Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. This is abstruse and difficult territory, partly because so much of it is locked up in huge volumes of densely printed Latin, partly because it is impossible to write illuminatingly about learned people without being equally learned oneself. Early-modern scholars were polymaths who were expected to know about more or less everything. A comparable amount of erudition is required by those who wish to interpret their work.
Review, 4879 words
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