Worlds Made by Words

Scholarship and Community in the Modern West

Anthony Grafton

    What comes through here is a deep respect for the achievements of classical scholarship and humanism. This includes the attempt to keep this tradition alive--hard to do in an age that often seems to prefer noise over the silence of an archive or library.
       --Andreas Hess, Times Higher Education

    It is exceedingly rare to find in one and the same scholar this love for archival material and the talent to show the world at large why it is interesting and important...The scope of Grafton's volume is vast, and the topics it addresses are uniformly important. He takes his readers on a long journey, from the Republic of Letters to the Babel of the Internet. If it is hard to say whether or not the road leads upward to the light, there is no doubt that we could not ask for anyone wiser to lead us. Like Dante's Virgil, Grafton knows everyone we meet along the way.
       --G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books

    Mr. Grafton may be steeped in the past, but he is no antiquarian. He is quick to link submerged traditions with present trends. He regards recent developments in technology, and their effects on libraries and on reading, as both a blessing and a burden. Ideally, new technologies don't displace old ones; they augment them. Cuneiform tablets, papyri, manuscripts, as well as books, remain essential to scholarship and to learning at large, if only because the look and feel of the past can be as important as its content. The larger, more troubling question is: Who will read them in the future? Sometimes Mr. Grafton sounds an elegiac note; he laments "the dull, provincial scholarship of our own sad time." He may be right to do so. Nevertheless, he himself represents the best proof that the Republic of Letters is alive and kicking.
       --Eric Ormsby, Wall Street Journal

    Some of the best and most vivid writing in this new book evokes the ambience, patrons and "smells of dust and noble rot," in havens ranging from the Bodleian to the old British Library Reading Room, from the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris ("a building that looks like the set from some forgotten dystopian sci-fi film of the 1970s") to the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, each with its own unique character and perspective...It is from that traditional vantage point that Grafton, Renaissance scholar extraordinaire, has, for the past forty years or so, dispassionately and indefatigably investigated the intellectual activities of the great early humanists.
       --Peter Green, Times Literary Supplement

    Grafton's essays dance nimbly across that gigantic chasm of time separating the Renaissance from Google...Worlds Made by Words amounts to a tour of Renaissance scholarship conducted by someone with a deep understanding of our own moment in the history of reading. It's an enriching combination.
       --Robert Fulford, National Post

    Grafton challenges readers to consider the pursuit of scholarship in the twenty-first century by reflecting on its practices and practitioners--from the libraries of the Renaissance to the classrooms of the late nineteenth and twentieth-century universities to the virtual spaces where minds and worlds meet today. Part history, part historiography, part autobiography, this is a manifesto for the future of intellectual history by one of its best practitioners.
       --Paula Findlen, author of Possessing Nature and editor of Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything

  • Cover: Worlds Made by Words
  • 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.