Search results for ""Author Anthony Grafton""

A revelatory new account of the magus—the learned magician—and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe.In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus—a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currents and public life of the Renaissance. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton argues that the magus in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive intellectual type, both different from and indebted to medieval counterparts as well as contemporaries like the engineer, the artist, the Christian humanist, and the religious reformer. Alongside these better-known figures, the magus had a transformative impact on his social world.Magus details the arts and experiences of learned magicians including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Grafton explores their methods, the knowledge they produced, the services they provided, and the overlapping political and social milieus to which they aspired—often, the circles of kings and princes. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these erudite men anchored debates about licit and illicit magic, the divine and the diabolical, and the nature of “good” and “bad” magicians. Over time, they turned magic into a complex art, which drew on contemporary engineering as well as classical astrology, probed the limits of what was acceptable in a changing society, and promised new ways to explore the self and exploit the cosmos.Resituating the magus in the social, cultural, and intellectual order of Renaissance Europe, Grafton sheds new light on both the recesses of the learned magician’s mind and the many worlds he inhabited.

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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.Renaissance astrologers predicted everything from the course of the future of humankind to the risks of a single investment, or even the weather. They analyzed the bodies and characters of countless clients, from rulers to criminals, and enjoyed widespread respect and patronage. This book traces Cardano’s contentious career from his first astrological pamphlet through his rise to high-level consulting and his remarkable autobiographical works. Delving into astrological principles and practices, Grafton shows how Cardano and his contemporaries adapted the ancient art for publication and marketing in a new era of print media and changing science. He maps the context of market and human forces that shaped Cardano’s practices—and the maneuvering that kept him at the top of a world rife with patronage, politics, and vengeful rivals.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.

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Two outstanding historians rebuild the West at the centre of the Western Civilizations course.

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An Open Letters Review Best Book of the Year“Grafton presents largely unfamiliar material…in a clear, even breezy style…Erudite.”—Michael Dirda, Washington PostIn this celebration of bookmaking in all its messy and intricate detail, Anthony Grafton captures both the physical and mental labors that went into the golden age of the book—compiling notebooks, copying and correcting proofs, preparing copy—and shows us how scribes and scholars shaped influential treatises and forgeries.Inky Fingers ranges widely, from the theological polemics of the early days of printing to the pathbreaking works of Jean Mabillon and Baruch Spinoza. Grafton draws new connections between humanistic traditions and intellectual innovations, textual learning and the delicate, arduous, error-riddled craft of making books. Through it all, he reminds us that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands, and the nitty gritty labor of printmakers has had a profound impact on the history of ideas.“Describes magnificent achievements, storms of controversy, and sometimes the pure devilment of scholars and printers…Captivating and often amusing.”—Wall Street Journal“Ideas, in this vivid telling, emerge not just from minds but from hands, not to mention the biceps that crank a press or heft a ream of paper.”—New York Review of Books“Grafton upends idealized understandings of early modern scholarship and blurs distinctions between the physical and mental labor that made the remarkable works of this period possible.”—Christine Jacobson, Book Post“Scholarship is a kind of heroism in Grafton’s account, his nine protagonists’ aching backs and tired eyes evidence of their valiant dedication to the pursuit of knowledge.”—London Review of Books

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A revelatory new account of the magus - the learned magician - and his place in the world of Renaissance EuropeAt the heart of the extraordinary ferment of the High Renaissance stood a distinctive, strange and beguiling figure: the magus. An unstable mix of scientist, bibliophile, engineer, fabulist and fraud, the magus ushered in modern physics and chemistry while also working on everything from secret codes to siege engines to magic tricks.Anthony Grafton's wonderfully original book discusses the careers of men who somehow managed to be both figures of startling genius and - by some measures - credulous or worse. The historical Faust, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa are all fascinating characters, closely linked to monarchs, artists and soldiers and sitting at the heart of any definition of why the Renaissance was a time of such restless innovation. The study of the stars, architecture, warfare, even medicine: all of these and more were revolutionized in some way by the experiments and tricks of these extraordinary individuals.No book does a better job of allowing us to understand the ways that magic, religion and science were once so intertwined and often so hard to tell apart.

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The close links between forgery and criticism throughout historyIn Forgers and Critics, Anthony Grafton provides a wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship. Labeling forgery the “criminal sibling” of criticism, Grafton describes a panorama of remarkable individuals—forgers from classical Greece through the recent past—who produced a variety of splendid triumphs of learning and style, as well as the scholarly detectives who honed the tools of scholarship in attempts to unmask these skillful fakers. In the process, Grafton discloses the extent, the coherence, and the historical interest of two significant and tightly intertwined strands in the Western intellectual tradition.

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Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was a Dutch humanist, scholar, and social critic, and one of the most important figures of the Renaissance. The Praise of Folly is perhaps his best-known work. Originally written to amuse his friend Sir Thomas More, this satiric celebration of pleasure, youth, and intoxication irreverently pokes fun at the pieties of theologians and the foibles that make us all human, while ultimately reaffirming the value of Christian ideals. No other book displays quite so completely the transition from the medieval to the modern world, and Erasmus's wit, wisdom, and critical spirit have lost none of their timeliness today. This Princeton Classics edition of The Praise of Folly features a new foreword by Anthony Grafton that provides an essential introduction to this iridescent and enduring masterpiece.

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From the late-fifteenth century onwards, scholars across Europe began to write books about how to read and evaluate histories. These pioneering works - which often take surprisingly modern-sounding positions - grew from complex early modern debates about law, religion, and classical scholarship. In this book, based on the Trevelyan Lectures of 2005, Anthony Grafton explains why so many of these works were written, why they attained so much insight - and why, in the centuries that followed, most scholars gradually forgot that they had existed. Elegant and accessible, What Was History? is a deliberate evocation of E. H. Carr's celebrated and icononclastic Trevelyan Lectures on What Is History?, and will appeal to a broad readership of students, scholars and historical enthusiasts. Anthony Grafton is one of the most celebrated historians writing in English today, and What Was History? is a powerful and imaginative exploration of some central themes in the history of European ideas.

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A panoramic history of the antiquarians whose discoveries transformed Renaissance culture and gave rise to new forms of art and knowledgeIn the early fifteenth century, a casket containing the remains of the Roman historian Livy was unearthed at a Benedictine abbey in Padua. The find was greeted with the same enthusiasm as the bones of a Christian saint, and established a pattern that antiquarians would follow for centuries to come. The Art of Discovery tells the stories of the Renaissance antiquarians who turned material remains of the ancient world into sources for scholars and artists, inspirations for palaces and churches, and objects of pilgrimage and devotion.Maren Elisabeth Schwab and Anthony Grafton bring to life some of the most spectacular finds of the age, such as Nero’s Golden House and the wooden placard that was supposedly nailed to the True Cross. They take readers into basements, caves, and cisterns, explaining how digs were undertaken and shedding light on the methods antiquarians—and the alchemists and craftspeople they consulted—used to interpret them. What emerges is not an origin story for modern archaeology or art history but rather an account of how early modern artisanal skills and technical expertise were used to create new knowledge about the past and inspire new forms of art, scholarship, and devotion in the present.The Art of Discovery challenges the notion that Renaissance antiquarianism was strictly a secular enterprise, revealing how the rediscovery of Christian relics and the bones of martyrs helped give rise to highly interdisciplinary ways of examining and authenticating objects of all kinds.

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In these pathbreaking essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion technological breakthroughs and the "digital skeptics" who fear the end of traditional humanistic scholarship, Rosenzweig re-envisions the practices and professional rites of academic historians while analyzing and advocating for the achievements of amateur historians. While he addresses the perils of "doing history" online, Rosenzweig eloquently identifies the promises of digital work, detailing innovative strategies for powerful searches in primary and secondary sources, the increased opportunities for dialogue and debate, and, most of all, the unprecedented access afforded by the Internet. Rosenzweig draws attention to the opening up of the historical record to new voices, the availability of documents and narratives to new audiences, and the attractions of digital technologies for new and diverse practitioners. Though he celebrates digital history's democratizing influences, Rosenzweig also argues that the future of the past in this digital age can only be ensured through the active resistance to efforts by corporations to control access and profit from the Web.

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In these pathbreaking essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion technological breakthroughs and the "digital skeptics" who fear the end of traditional humanistic scholarship, Rosenzweig re-envisions the practices and professional rites of academic historians while analyzing and advocating for the achievements of amateur historians. While he addresses the perils of "doing history" online, Rosenzweig eloquently identifies the promises of digital work, detailing innovative strategies for powerful searches in primary and secondary sources, the increased opportunities for dialogue and debate, and, most of all, the unprecedented access afforded by the Internet. Rosenzweig draws attention to the opening up of the historical record to new voices, the availability of documents and narratives to new audiences, and the attractions of digital technologies for new and diverse practitioners. Though he celebrates digital history's democratizing influences, Rosenzweig also argues that the future of the past in this digital age can only be ensured through the active resistance to efforts by corporations to control access and profit from the Web.

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Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

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A re-examination of the social processes behind religious conversions in the Ancient and Early Middle Ages. 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 writersas 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 andrelated processes of cultural interaction, diffusion, and change both in the historical sub-fields of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages and well beyond. This book is one of two collections of essays on religious conversion drawn from the activities of the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University between 1999 and 2001. The other volume, Conversion: Old Worlds and New, is also published by the Universityof Rochester Press. Contributors: Susan Elm, Anthony Grafton, Richard Lim, Rebecca Lyman, Michael Maas, Neil McLynn, Kenneth Mills, Eric Rebillard, Julia M. H. Smith, Raymond Van Dam.

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The subjects Wolf addressed have dominated Homeric scholarship for almost two centuries. Especially important were his analyses of the history of writing and of the nature of Alexandrian scholarship and his consideration of the composition of the Homeric poems--which set the terms for the analyst/unitarian controversy. His exploration of the history of the transmission of the text in antiquity opened a new field of research and transformed conceptions of the relations of ancient and modern culture. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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A quiet revolution in knowledge separated the early modern period in Japan from all previous time. After 1600, self-appointed investigators used the model of the land and cartographic surveys of the newly unified state to observe and order subjects such as agronomy, medicine, gastronomy, commerce, travel, and entertainment. They subsequently circulated their findings through a variety of commercially printed texts: maps, gazetteers, family encyclopedias, urban directories, travel guides, official personnel rosters, and instruction manuals for everything from farming to lovemaking. In this original and gracefully written book, Mary Elizabeth Berry considers the social processes that drove the information explosion of the 1600s. Inviting readers to examine the contours and meanings of this transformation, Berry provides a fascinating account of the conversion of the public from an object of state surveillance into a subject of self-knowledge. "Japan in Print" shows how, as investigators collected and disseminated richly diverse data, they came to presume in their audience a standard of cultural literacy that changed anonymous consumers into an 'us' bound by common frames of reference. This shared space of knowledge made society visible to itself and in the process subverted notions of status hierarchy. Berry demonstrates that the new public texts projected a national collectivity characterized by universal access to markets, mobility, sociability, and self-fashioning.

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“A vast cabinet of curiosities.”—Stephen Greenblatt“Eclectic rather than exhaustive, less an encyclopedia than a buffet.”—Frederic Raphael, Literary ReviewHow do we get from the polis to the police? Or from Odysseus’s sirens to those of an ambulance? The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome is all around us, imitated, resisted, reworked, and misunderstood. In this beautifully illustrated and encyclopedic compendium, a team of leading scholars investigates the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science.From Academy to Zoology, Aristotle and the Argonauts to Pegasus and Persia, The Classical Tradition looks at facts and adages, people, places, and ideas to reveal how the Classical tradition has shaped human endeavors from government to medicine, drama to urban planning, legal theory to popular culture. At once authoritative and accessible, learned and entertaining, it illuminates the vitality of these enduring influences.

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Barely acknowledged in his lifetime, the New Science of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is an astonishingly perceptive and ambitious attempt to decipher the history, mythology and laws of the ancient world. Discarding the Renaissance notion of the classical as an idealised model for the modern, it argues that the key to true understanding of the past lies in accepting that the customs and emotional lives of ancient Greeks and Romans, Egyptians, Jews and Babylonians were radically different from our own. Along the way, Vico explores a huge variety of topics, ranging from physics to poetics, money to monsters, and family structures to the Flood. Marking a crucial turning-point in humanist thinking, New Science has remained deeply influential since the dawn of Romanticism, inspiring the work of Karl Marx and even influencing the framework for Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

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None of the works included among Erasmus’ ‘Literary and Educational Writings’ in the Collected Works of Erasmus captures his most adventurous thinking about how texts signify in – and thereby make or remake – worlds of thought, feeling, and action. The one that comes closest to doing so, the Ratio verae theologiae (‘A System of True Theology’), was first published separately in 1518 and 1519, then appeared in the preliminaries to the New Testament in Erasmus’ (revised) 1519 edition. This handy Ratio or compendious ‘System’ gave advice on how to interpret complex texts and develop persuasive arguments based upon them. Its lessons were applied to the canonical Scriptures as source, and to everyday Christian theology as target discourse. They unfold in response to the special difficulties and incitements of the biblical text in Latin and Greek, within a framework provided by classical grammar and rhetoric, adjusted to the examples of the Church Fathers as exemplary interpreters of the Bible. At every turn, the Ratio reveals the instincts and intuitions of an exceptional theorist and practitioner of the cognitive, social, and political arts of written language. This student edition, the first of its kind in any language, is based on the translation and notes by Robert D. Sider in the Collected Works of Erasmus Volume 41. It is designed to make it easier to estimate the long-term value of this particular work and of Erasmus’ works more generally, and to allow for a multidisciplinary understanding of the lives of human beings as symbol-using creatures in worlds constructed partly by texts.

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