Anthony Grafton treats Alberti's writings as mosaics fashioned out of passages collected from ancient sources. He shows that, in the compositional interstices between such passages, Alberti expresses his most immediate social concerns: with his own position and with the reception of the work by his first readers. By focusing on the interstices rather than on the body of the texts, Grafton draws the most convincing portrait to date of Alberti as a man in a social environment.
   --Jack M. Greenstein, Wall Street Journal

[Grafton] has produced a convincing and engaging account of Alberti's intellectual milieu in what is arguably the most important general contribution to Albertian studies of recent decades.
   --Bruce Boucher, New York Times Book Review

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

Read More by Anthony Grafton:

• Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer
• The Footnote: A Curious History
• Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800
• New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery
• Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation
• Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea
• The Classical Tradition
• Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West