The Alchemist of Erudition

Anthony Grafton spins lively narratives about the forgotten geniuses of yesteryear

Anthony Grafton is a scholar’s scholar. Quite literally so. In his work,

Mr. Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton University, re-creates lost worlds of erudition, uncovering the secret passions lurking in some of the most arid-sounding studies the mind can imagine. He portrays long-forgotten Renaissance experts on ancient texts, for example, as intellectual action heroes, boldly annotating where no man had gone before. Reading Mr. Grafton makes you proud to be a bookworm.

Occasional remarks by peers in scholarly journals have implied that Mr. Grafton’s work is, perhaps, just a little too interesting. The vividness of his metaphors sometimes violates academic decorum. He once said that footnotes had the same effect on a scholar as clover on a pig. He compared the Corpus Hermeticum, a spuriously “ancient” work, to a hot fudge sundae (its pagan and Christian elements mixed up like ice cream and toppings). And the title of his most recent collection of essays, Bring Out Your Dead, published by Harvard University Press early this year, will remind nerds (of a certain age) of one particularly mordant scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Intellectual historians sometimes grumble that their peers don’t regard them as doing “real” history. After all, they study books and ideas, rather than digging around in archives to chart the course of wars and revolutions, or the almost-unreconstructible life of, say, an Aztec peasant. So Mr. Grafton’s interest in an obscure French lawyer’s jottings in his copy of the Iliad seems, in all senses, a marginal concern. One expects him to resemble the stereotypical librarian.

But in person, his manner is a combination of the easygoing with the highly excitable. Chatting over breakfast at a diner in Manhattan, his energy level is at its lowest setting; for most people, this would count as keen enthusiasm. He grows even more kinetic in a scholarly gathering. The night before, lecturing at the New York Institute for the Humanities, he seemed to hop and weave in place, as if vibrating with intellectual energy. (Mr. Grafton was truly in his element: The topic of the symposium was Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit polymath who wrote a small library’s worth of treatises.) At still more intense levels of concentration, Mr. Grafton chews on his own beard.

Sharing the Cultural Wealth

Mr. Grafton is unrelenting in his generosity. His colleagues are, it seems, uniformly brilliant; his graduate students, all above average. A reviewer of his first book noted that it was “remarkably polite even in its polemics” -- a quality that contrasts with some of the primary sources used in his research. He has studied many a long and furious denunciation, in heavily sarcastic Latin, of one eruditio by another.

One beneficiary of his good nature is Caroline Winterer, an assistant professor of history at San Jose State University, whose book The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Johns Hopkins University Press) appeared earlier this year with a glowing endorsement by Mr. Grafton. She has met Mr. Grafton only briefly, at conferences, but found his writing an inspiration when she began doing research for the dissertation that ultimately became her first book. “Intellectual history as a whole is very unfashionable, and especially when you study those disciplines that didn’t really win out in the modern academy. Tony Grafton works on old, dead classicists. How much less-sexy can you get?” she says, laughing. “And yet his work is read not only by medievalists and Renaissance scholars, but by a general audience as well.”

Indeed, Mr. Grafton has become the most improbable of popular historians. His essays appear regularly in such publications as The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The American Scholar. His spry book analyzing that most pedantic of literary genres, the footnote, was a crossover hit with nonacademic readers. His own footnotes (with citations of work in English, French, German, Italian, and the classical languages) give the impression that Mr. Grafton is on close terms with scholars of several countries -- and at least six centuries.

His ebullience disappears only once in the course of several interviews: when the reporter dares to criticize the polyhistors -- 17th-century experts-in-everything, whose writings were extremely popular at the time. They offered readers comprehensive, if somewhat chaotic, guides to the entire universe of learning. Any given polyhistorical textbook might lurch from theology to law, to astronomy, then to punctuation, before coming back to law, followed by a long chapter on Aramaic. As Mr. Grafton himself once put it, they “wrote at fantastic length in barbarous Latin about tedious and terrifying subjects.”

At the suggestion that their books sound, well, unappetizing, Mr. Grafton seems a little hurt. He has been collecting books by the polyhistors for years, and reads them with pleasure. “The challenge is to find your way into a world, a mental atmosphere, in which these books were appetizing,” he says.

By the early 18th century, the polyhistors had become something of a joke among intellectuals, who were beginning to value specialization. Mr. Grafton may be the first person to have studied these quirky encyclopedias in many a decade. It clearly gives him some pain to hear the hard-working polyhistors bad-mouthed.

“Tony sees that the world of scholarship is not a zero-sum game,” remarks Ms. Winterer. “I think he has so much extra brain power that he doesn’t see the point in being petty.”

Mr. Grafton was introduced to the life of the mind at the family dinner table. His father was a prominent journalist who learned his craft from studying the classic English essayists. In 1963, not long after Mr. Grafton’s bar mitzvah, the topic of the day in his household was the political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s controversial articles on the Adolf Eichmann trial, appearing in The New Yorker. “It was the serious talk of serious people about serious things; it made a compelling way to encounter some of the complexities of the world and history for the first time,” he once wrote.

He found his way to the world of the polyhistors indirectly. “I tripped one day on my way to becoming a classics major,” he jokes. A course on Renaissance humanism at the University of Chicago, where Mr. Grafton did his undergraduate and graduate work, introduced him to what scholars call “neo-Latin” -- the huge mass of literature and scholarship composed between the medieval period and the Enlightenment. “I could read Latin and Greek, and I really liked this later writing, with its dense thicket of allusions.” The study of neo-Latin subsequently became a flourishing field, but in the 1960s very few scholars were interested. “You could go on and on reading texts [from ancient Greece and Rome] that people had already studied minutely. But here was this vast range of Latin texts that nobody seemed to have looked at.”

Another influence came from more recent works of scholarship he devoured in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, including Donald R. Kelley’s The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship and George Huppert’s The Idea of Perfect History. “They yielded the notion that there had been something like a historical revolution in early modern Europe,” he says, “a transformation in the theory and practice of how historians worked.”

When it came time to write a dissertation, Mr. Grafton’s unusual combination of interests led him to Joseph Scaliger, a French Calvinist scholar working in the field of “chronology.” It was, arguably, the single hottest topic in European intellectual life during the 16th century. (Mr. Grafton jokes that Scaliger was the Foucault of his age.) Experts in chronology tried to piece together available records to create a universal history of mankind. This required a minute knowledge of all ancient literature, of course, including the Bible. But Scaliger’s work also involved technical analyses of the calendrical systems of various cultures. To follow Scaliger’s arguments about the Greek lunar year, Mr. Grafton had to become a fairly accomplished astronomer, at least by 16th-century standards.

He happened to be in Leiden when the great chronologer’s remains were disinterred from a church, allowing him to contemplate “the broad smile of Scaliger’s skull,” as he later put it. “I had the chance to shake the bones of his right hand,” he wrote, “neatly assembled in a Baggie.”

Before the Two Cultures

From his exploration of neo-Latin works that had gathered dust for ages, Mr. Grafton began to develop a sense that the once-legendary titans of academe had received a bad rap. He points to influential passages in the work of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, who disparaged the humanists’ learning. Regarding commentary on ancient texts as useless, Bacon and Descartes championed concepts such as experimentation and mathematical analysis. Those blows “knocked the good books out of the hands of the young, who are foolish and desire novelty,” grumbled one humanist in 1668. However little they had in common, both old-school philologists and newfangled scientists alike could agree that a drastic change had taken place in the scholarly world. But Mr. Grafton’s work suggests that that impression was misleading. The scientists of early modern Europe were steeped in classical culture -- while humanists who debated furiously over how to edit ancient texts were often fascinated by recent developments in “natural philosophy.”

He cites the example of Johannes Kepler. Besides working out the mathematics to account for planetary motion, the great astronomer could parse a mean chronological argument -- even pointing out to the great Scaliger himself where he had made an interpretive mistake, based on a misplaced comma in a defective edition of Plutarch. In the work that absorbed the era’s greatest minds, writes Mr. Grafton, “scholarship and science were necessarily fused into a single pursuit not identified with any modern discipline.”

Against the idea that Renaissance humanists simply parroted what they read in classical texts, Mr. Grafton argues that some scholars became hard-boiled philological detectives. In Forgers and Critics, he recounts the career of Isaac Casaubon, a scholarly workaholic known for his editions of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Diogenes Laertius. One diary entry from 1597 expresses much irritation at getting to his study at 5 in the morning; he had overslept. A microscopic knowledge of Greek prose style enabled Casaubon to prove that the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, an ancient sage, were actually a modern forgery. The skills developed by humanists in studying classical texts, including stylistic analysis and careful examination of the paper trail, became the cornerstones of historical research. (Casaubon himself went on to posthumous notoriety at the hands of George Eliot, who named a character in Middlemarch after him: a stuffy pedant who, as another character puts it, has semicolons and parentheses in his veins instead of blood.)

Oozing Enthusiasm

With hindsight, it is clear that Forgers and Critics was a milestone for Mr. Grafton. In an open letter to “Tony” appearing in the Journal of the History of Ideas in 1991, James Hankins said that he had often found Mr. Grafton’s earlier work interesting “but, to be frank ... a bit dense. At the same time, I’ve envied your ability in lectures to make what seem to be the driest subjects positively ooze with fascination.” Mr. Hankins, a professor of history at Harvard University, detected a change in his colleague’s writing. “It seems to me that you’ve at last managed to transfer the liveliness and wit of your lecturing style to cold prose.”

Mr. Grafton’s knack for the concrete detail is striking. “He captures the physicality of intellectual life,” says Ms. Winterer, “the experience of handling an old book, for example.” She cites his practice of quoting from the marginal notes that scholars left in their copies of one another’s books -- peering over their shoulders, in effect, as they went about the day’s reading. The resulting portraits are vivid and full-blooded. “He shows the passion of scholars as real human beings,” says Ms. Winterer. “He helps you see what there was about a certain debate that made a scholar get up in the morning and go to the scriptorium to spend 18 hours in a semi-darkened room, ruining his eyes reading an old manuscript.”

Critics have noted that Mr. Grafton’s work, while learned and engaging, tends to focus on exceptional figures; he appears not to offer a broad analysis of intellectual history, but rather a series of case studies. Writing in the Journal of Modern History in 2000, Brian W. Ogilvie, an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, notes that Mr. Grafton’s work “explicitly addresses ... the most sophisticated Renaissance readers rather than their pedestrian contemporaries.” Several of Mr. Grafton’s books are collections of essays. However rich, his writings are not, some have complained, sufficiently panoramic.

“On the whole,” says Mr. Grafton, “guilty as charged.” An unapologetic champion of intellectual biography as a genre of scholarship, he calls himself “a pointillist, or something of the sort, by nature and preference.” His work tries to portray the intellectual world of a given time and place as it is refracted through the work of a single scholar. “Given how little we know of most of the fields I explore,” says Mr. Grafton, “it seems only reasonable to me to [cover them] one case at a time.”

“There’s a sensibility from this era that I grow ever more impressed with over time,” says Mr. Grafton. “It’s the understanding that tradition, a sophisticated tradition anyway, like that of the classics, always knows more than you do.” He sees his work as a continuing investigation of how scholars interact with those traditions -- learning from them and preserving them, while at the same time transforming them.

A case in point is his book on Leon Battista Alberti, published in 2000. Perhaps the most strenuous overachiever of the Renaissance, Alberti was a gifted artist, inventor, architect, and writer, as well as a prodigious athlete. (He could leap over the head of a man standing next to him, if one contemporary account is to be believed). In Jacob Burkhardt’s classic study The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Alberti stands as the antithesis of those scholars who dedicated their lives to annotating ancient texts.

But Mr. Grafton shows that Burkhardt carefully airbrushed his portrait of the universal genius, removing evidence that Alberti was just as bookish as any humanist. (In quoting one Renaissance text, for example, Burkhardt removed a passage that said Alberti “could not bear to live without letters.”) While criticizing the bibliomaniacs of his day, Alberti himself plundered classical literature for inspiration. His influential writings on architecture, for example, transformed fragmentary Roman treatises into something modern and original. The figure of Alberti emerging from Mr. Grafton’s account is a sort of performance artist, using the humanist tradition as raw material for his spellbinding one-man show.

Lately, Mr. Grafton has been studying some traditions that institutions of higher learning have long since abandoned. In a recent book, he reconstructs the professional life of a Renaissance astrologer, Girolamo Cardano, whose name became as much a household word to Europe’s intellectual elite as that of his peer, Joseph Scaliger. His reputation turned, in part, on his technical innovations in analyzing astrological birth charts. But it helped that Cardano’s best-selling collection of horoscopes included chapters on major scholars of the day. Mr. Grafton points out that astrology was not simply respectable but a basic part of the academic curriculum -- at least at any university with a medical school, since the competent doctor needed to be able to account for relevant cosmic influences.

This summer, Mr. Grafton says, he is finishing up a short book about the learned practitioners of magic who appeared in Europe in the years just before and after 1500. At the center of the story is Georg Helmstetter, of Heidelberg -- a figure somewhat better known under his professional name, Faust. “He was an at least moderately learned magician,” says Mr. Grafton, implicitly contrasting him to the rather more impressive scholar in Goethe’s poem.

If the distinction between science and the humanities was not rigid in the late Renaissance, that between the occult and technology was even more fluid during the earlier period that now interests Mr. Grafton. “Faust had a magic lantern,” he says, “or so I interpret the stories [claiming] that he was able to bring the characters from Homer’s Odyssey into the lecture hall to scare his students. Alberti was also interested in projection. This is part of a tradition where engineering and magic crossed each other.” Both were ways, he says, of “forcing nature to do things.”

The lines among disciplines are starting to appear very blurry indeed. One wonders if there might not be some deep continuity between scholarship and sorcery. Mr. Grafton, the most genial of traditionalists, commands some strange forces at the crossroads of learning. Intellectual history, as he practices it, looks like a kind of necromancy, a way of clasping hands with the dead -- followed by a still more electrifying moment, when the past squeezes back.

ANTHONY GRAFTON, LOC. CIT.

In reconstructing the careers of scholiasts, polyhistors, and other extinct species of professional scholar, Anthony Grafton has added a shelf or two to the academic library. His bibliography includes the following titles.

Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1983, 1993)

Prolegomena to Homer, 1795, by F.A. Wolf, translated with introduction and notes by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E.G. Zetzel (Princeton University Press, 1985)

From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe, by Anthony Grafton and Liza Jardine (Harvard University Press, 1986)

Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton University Press, 1990)

Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Harvard University Press, 1991)

New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Harvard University Press, 1992)

Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (The University of Michigan Press, 1997)

The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997)

Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, edited by Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi (MIT Press, 1999)

Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Hill and Wang, 2000)

Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Harvard University Press, 2002)

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