Defenders of the Text

The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800

Anthony Grafton

    A sheer delight--a real feast of intellectual scholarship and a hilarious account of the mannerist fantasia that was the European intellectual scene in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
       --Osywn Murray, Times Literary Supplement

    Grafton writes with an admirable clarity and zest...The kind of scholarly book that an interested non-specialist can read with pleasure and a sense of intellectual discovery.
       --Washington Post Book World

    This excellent book is a major contribution to scholarship. It is highly original, both in the problems it formulates and in the solutions it offers, acute in its reasoning, and elegant, sharp, and often witty.
       --Paul Oskar Kristeller, New Criterion

    Grafton writes with enviable lucidity and wit...This [book] will give enormous stimulus and pleasure.
       --Brian Vickers, Times Higher Education Supplement

    Delightful, fresh, well-written, stimulating, provocative, irreverent, and most informative. [Grafton] has contributed to our understanding of 'the making of the modern mind.'
       --Richard Popkin, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

  • Cover: Defenders of the Text
  • A photo of the author

Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Chair of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.