This excellent new book by Anthony Grafton, Professor of History at Princeton University, 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 in its presentation. It covers many aspects of the intellectual history of Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, and is firmly based on both primary sources and secondary studies, some of them little known and hard to find. Many crucial sources are quoted in the original Latin or transliterated Greek, and there are very few typographical errors, something on which both the author and the press are to be congratulated. The result is a comprehensive panorama of European intellectual history which is so rich and diversified that even the specialist may learn a lot from it. It covers not only history and philology but also the natural sciences and philosophy, jurisprudence and theology, and throws new light on even well-known facts by showing their connections with certain little-known details.
The volume consists of nine chapters, all of which had been published separately in periodicals or miscellaneous volumes between 1977 and 1991, to which a new introduction has been added. This essay, “The Humanists Reassessed,” serves to explain the basic purpose and method of the volume and to give an introduction and supplement to the first chapter on Renaissance humanism.
In spite of this disparate origin, the volume presents itself as
