Anthony Grafton

Anthony Grafton (sometimes Anthony T. Grafton) (born 21 May 1950) is a Jewish-American historian and the current Henry Putnam University Professor at Princeton University. He is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize.

Grafton was educated at the University of Chicago, where he took his A.B. and Ph.D. in rapid succession. He studied briefly at the University of London under the celebrated ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano, and retains links with the Warburg Institute. After a brief period teaching at Cornell's Department of History, he has been a professor of history at Princeton University since 1975. In 2006, Grafton received a rare honorary degree of Leiden University. [http://www.history.leidenuniv.nl/content_docs/laudatio_anthony_grafton.pdf] Since January 2007, he has served on the Editorial Board of the "Journal of Modern History".

Work

Anthony Grafton is noted for his studies of the classical tradition from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, and in the history of historical scholarship. His many books include a profound study of the scholarship and chronology of the foremost classical scholar of the late Renaissance, Joseph Scaliger (2 vols, 1983-1993), a revisionist account (with Lisa Jardine) of the significance of Renaissance education ("From Humanism to the Humanities", 1986), and, more recently, studies of Girolamo Cardano as an astrologer (1999) and Leon Battista Alberti (2000).

The best introduction to his preoccupation with the relations between scholarship and science in the early modern period is perhaps (still) "Defenders of the Text" (1991). In some ways his most original and accessible book is "The Footnote: A curious history" (1997; published in German as "Die Tragischen Ursprünge der deutschen Fußnote"), a case-study in what might be called the history of history, from below.

He also writes on a wide variety of topics for "The New Republic", "The American Scholar" and "New York Review of Books".

Works

Books

*"Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship", Oxford-Warburg Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983-1993).
*with Lisa Jardine, "From Humanism to the Humanities" (, 1986).
*"Forgers and Critics. Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
*"Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in the Age of Science, 1450-1800" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
*"Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers" (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
*"The Footnote: A Curious History" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
*"Cardano's Cosmos : The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
*"Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
*"Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
*"What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
*with Megan Hale Williams, "Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
*"Codex in Crisis" (New York: The Crumpled Press, 2008).

Essays

* [http://www.nybooks.com/authors/298 Anthony Grafton] at the New York Review of Books