Daniel Rosenberg

Anthony Grafton

Our critically acclaimed smash hit Cartographies of Time is now available in paperback. In this first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time, authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns. From medieval manuscripts to websites, Cartographies of Time features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways, curving, crossing, branching, defy conventional thinking about the form. A fifty-four-foot-long timeline from 1753 is mounted on a scroll and encased in a protective box. Another timeline uses the different parts of the human body to show the genealogies of Jesus Christ and the rulers of Saxony. Ladders created by missionaries in eighteenth-century Oregon illustrate Bible stories in a vertical format to convert Native Americans. Also included is the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by their geographic location, alongside little-known works by famous figures, including a historical chronology by the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator and a chronological board game patented by Mark Twain. Presented in a lavishly illustrated edition, Cartographies of Time is a revelation to anyone interested in the role visual forms have played in our evolving conception of history

A History of the Timeline

Cartographies of Time

Glenn W Most

Salvatore Settis

Collects alphabetically arranged essays on how classical tradition has shaped popular culture, government, mathematics, medicine, and drama.

The Classical Tradition

Ann Blair

Paul Duguid

Anja-Silvia Goeing

"Information technology shapes nearly every part of modern life, and debates about information--its meaning, effects, and applications--are central to a range of fields, from economics, technology, and politics to library science, media studies, and cultural studies. This rich, unique resource traces the history of information with an approach designed to draw connections across fields and perspectives, and provide essential context for our current age of information. Clear, accessible, and authoritative, the book opens with a series of articles that provide a narrative history of information from premodern practices to twenty-first-century information culture. This section focuses on major developments in the creation, storage, search, exchange, management, and manipulation of information, as well as the many meanings and uses of information over time. Coverage spans Europe, North America, and many other places and periods, including the medieval Islamic world and early modern East Asia, as well as the emergence of global networks. A second, alphabetical section includes more than 100 concise articles that cover specific concepts (e.g., data, intellectual property, privacy); formats and genres (books, databases, maps, newspapers, scrolls, social media); people (archivists, diplomats and spies, readers, secretaries, teachers); practices (censorship, forecasting, learning, surveilling, translating); processes (digitization, quantification, storage and search); systems (bureaucracy, platforms, telecommunications); technologies (algorithms, cameras, computers), and much more. The book concludes with an informative glossary, defining terms from "analog/digital" to "World Wide Web.""--

A Historical Companion

Information

A revelatory new account of the magus - the learned magician - and his place in the world of Renaissance Europe

At the heart of the extraordinary ferment of the High Renaissance stood a distinctive, strange and beguiling figure: the magus. An unstable mix of scientist, bibliophile, engineer, fabulist and fraud, the magus ushered in modern physics and chemistry while also working on everything from secret codes to siege engines to magic tricks.

Anthony Grafton's wonderfully original book discusses the careers of men who somehow managed to be both figures of startling genius and - by some measures - credulous or worse. The historical Faust, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa are all fascinating characters, closely linked to monarchs, artists and soldiers and sitting at the heart of any definition of why the Renaissance was a time of such restless innovation. The study of the stars, architecture, warfare, even medicine: all of these and more were revolutionized in some way by the experiments and tricks of these extraordinary individuals.

No book does a better job of allowing us to understand the ways that magic, religion and science were once so intertwined and often so hard to tell apart.

The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa

Magus

The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800

Defenders of the Text

The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe

Inky Fingers

A landmark history that traces the creation, management, and sharing of information through six centuries Thanks to modern technological advances, we now enjoy seemingly unlimited access to information. Yet how did information become so central to our everyday lives, and how did its processing and storage make our data-driven era possible? This volume is the first to consider these questions in comprehensive detail, tracing the global emergence of information practices, technologies, and more, from the premodern era to the present. With entries spanning archivists to algorithms and scribes to surveilling, this is the ultimate reference on how information has shaped and been shaped by societies. Written by an international team of experts, the book's inspired and original long- and short-form contributions reconstruct the rise of human approaches to creating, managing, and sharing facts and knowledge. Thirteen full-length chapters discuss the role of information in pivotal epochs and regions, with chief emphasis on Europe and North America, but also substantive treatment of other parts of the world as well as current global interconnections. More than 100 alphabetical entries follow, focusing on specific tools, methods, and concepts—from ancient coins to the office memo, and censorship to plagiarism. The result is a wide-ranging, deeply immersive collection that will appeal to anyone drawn to the story behind our modern mania for an informed existence. Tells the story of information’s rise from 1450 through to today Covers a range of eras and regions, including the medieval Islamic world, late imperial East Asia, early modern and modern Europe, and modern North America Includes 100 concise articles on wide-ranging topics: Concepts: data, intellectual property, privacy Formats and genres: books, databases, maps, newspapers, scrolls and rolls, social media People: archivists, diplomats and spies, readers, secretaries, teachers Practices: censorship, forecasting, learning, political reporting, translating Processes: digitization, quantification, storage and search Systems: bureaucracy, platforms, telecommunications Technologies: cameras, computers, lithography Provides an informative glossary, suggested further reading (a short bibliography accompanies each entry), and a detailed index Written by an international team of notable contributors, including Jeremy Adelman, Lorraine Daston, John-Paul Ghobrial, Earle Havens, Niv Horesh, Sarah Igo, Lauren Kassell, Pamela Long, David McKitterick, Elias Muhanna, Carla Nappi, Geoffrey Nunberg, Neil Safier, Haun Saussy, Erin Schreiner, Jacob Soll, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Alexandra Walsham, and many more.

The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe focuses on the ways in which culture is moved from one generation or group to another, not by exact replication but by accretion or revision. The contributors to the volume each consider how the passing of historical information is an organic process that allows for the transformation of previously accepted truth. The volume covers a broad and fascinating scope of subjects presented by leading scholars. Anthony Grafton's contribution on the fifteenth-century forger Annius of Viterbo emphasizes the role of imagination in the classical revival; Lisa Jardine demonstrates the way in which Erasmus helped turn a technical and rebarbative book by Rudolph Agricola into a sixteenth-century success story; Alan Charles Kors finds the roots of Enlightenment atheism in the works of French Catholic theologians; Donald R. Kelley follows the legal idea of "custom" from its formulation by the ancients to its assimilation into the modern social sciences; and Lawrence Stone shows how changes in legal action against female adultery between 1670 and 1857 reflect basic shifts in English moral values.

The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe

From the late-fifteenth century onwards, scholars across Europe began to write books about how to read and evaluate histories. These pioneering works - which often take surprisingly modern-sounding positions - grew from complex early modern debates about law, religion, and classical scholarship. In this book, based on the Trevelyan Lectures of 2005, Anthony Grafton explains why so many of these works were written, why they attained so much insight - and why, in the centuries that followed, most scholars gradually forgot that they had existed. Elegant and accessible, What Was History? is a deliberate evocation of E. H. Carr's celebrated and icononclastic Trevelyan Lectures on What Is History?, and will appeal to a broad readership of students, scholars and historical enthusiasts. Anthony Grafton is one of the most celebrated historians writing in English today, and What Was History? is a powerful and imaginative exploration of some central themes in the history of European ideas.

The Art of History in Early Modern Europe

What was History?

Renowned historian Anthony Grafton invites us to see the scholars of early modern Europe as laborers. Bookish but hardly divorced from physical tasks, they were artisans of script and print. Drawing new connections between text and craft, publishing and intellectual history, Grafton shows that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands.

In this engrossing account, footnotes to history give way to footnotes as history, recounting in their subtle way the curious story of the progress of knowledge in written form.

A Curious History

The Footnote

Pamela O. Long

Benjamin Weiss

Brian A. Curran

The many meanings of obelisks across nearly forty centuries, from Ancient Egypt (which invented them) to twentieth-century America (which put them in Hollywood epics). Nearly every empire worthy of the name—from ancient Rome to the United States—has sought an Egyptian obelisk to place in the center of a ceremonial space. Obelisks—giant standing stones, invented in Ancient Egypt as sacred objects—serve no practical purpose. For much of their history their inscriptions, in Egyptian hieroglyphics, were completely inscrutable. Yet over the centuries dozens of obelisks have made the voyage from Egypt to Rome, Constantinople, and Florence; to Paris, London, and New York. New obelisks and even obelisk-shaped buildings rose as well—the Washington Monument being a noted example. Obelisks, everyone seems to sense, connote some very special sort of power. This beautifully illustrated book traces the fate and many meanings of obelisks across nearly forty centuries—what they meant to the Egyptians, and how other cultures have borrowed, interpreted, understood, and misunderstood them through the years. In each culture obelisks have taken on new meanings and associations. To the Egyptians, the obelisk was the symbol of a pharaoh's right to rule and connection to the divine. In ancient Rome, obelisks were the embodiment of Rome's coming of age as an empire. To nineteenth-century New Yorkers, the obelisk in Central Park stood for their country's rejection of the trappings of empire just as it was itself beginning to acquire imperial power. And to a twentieth-century reader of Freud, the obelisk had anatomical and psychological connotations. The history of obelisks is a story of technical achievement, imperial conquest, Christian piety and triumphalism, egotism, scholarly brilliance, political hubris, bigoted nationalism, democratic self-assurance, Modernist austerity, and Hollywood kitsch—in short, the story of Western civilization.

A History

Obelisk

Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically-produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy, and feeling itself. The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and society. The book also considers the well-established topics of realism and arthouse auteurism, and re-thinks film history by investigating the presence of melodrama in neorealism and post-war modernism. It places film within its broader cultural context to trace the connections of canonical melodramatists like Visconti and Matarazzo to traditions of opera, the musical theatre of the sceneggiata, visual arts, and magazines. In so doing it seeks to capture the artistry and emotional experiences found within a truly popular form.

Scholarship and Community in the Modern West

Worlds Made by Words

Professor of History Anthony Grafton

Just as it "takes a thief to catch a thief," so the forger greatly aids the search for historical truth, maintains Anthony Grafton in this wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship. Labeling forgery the "criminal sibling" of criticism, he describes a panorama of remarkable individuals--forgers, from classical Greece through the recent past, who produced a variety of splendid triumphs of learning and style, and scholarly detectives, who honed the tools of scholarship in attempts to unmask these skillful fakers. In the process he discloses the extent, the coherence, and the historical interest of two significant and tightly intertwined strands in the Western intellectual tradition. "The desire to forge," writes the author, "can bite and infect almost anyone: . . . the honest as well as the rogue." Forgers are inspired not only by ambition or greed but also by impulses to play jokes, exuberant desires to see the past made whole again, or serious wishes to invoke divine or distantly historical authority for particular spiritual or national traditions. Whatever their goals, forgers in classical antiquity as well as in the modern era have often been well ahead of critics in the pursuit of methods of authenticating documents, and Grafton shows that many techniques normally considered the invention of scholars in early modern Europe were already employed in classical times. This accessible work discusses forgers as different from each other as Dionysus the "Renegade," Erasmus, Carlo Sigonio, James Macpherson ("Ossian"), Thomas Chatterton, and the great sixteenth-century Dominican scholar Giovanni Nanni (Annius) of Viterbo, whose forged histories by Berosus, Manetho, and other ancient authors drove the real histories of the ancient world from the literary marketplace for almost a hundred years. One chapter is devoted to comparing three scholars--Porphyry (third century), Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), and Richard Reitzenstein (1861-1931)--whose efforts to deal with the same body of forged material, the Hermetica, reveal both continuity and change in critical method. What emerges from Forgers and Critics is a new appreciation for a strange literary genre that has flourished for over 2500 years--amusing its uninvolved observers, enraging its humiliated victims, and, most importantly, contributing to a richer sense of what the past was really like.

Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship

Forgers and Critics

David A Bell

This beautifully written history recenters the West and rekindles the past in a vivid narrative crafted for beginning students. Grafton and Bell tell the epic story of a West engaged in a continuing search for order across politics, society, and culture, driven by internal tensions and global influences. They deliver the past not as a path to the present but as it was lived at the time, grounded in a balanced, comprehensive, chronological narrative. Combined with rich digital resources to instill practical history skills, The West establishes a dynamic NEW foundation for teaching the Western Civilizations course.

First Edition, 1-Volume

The West: A New History

David A. Bell

The West: A New History (First Edition) (Vol. 1)

Paolo Sachet

Geri Della Rocca de Candal

'To err is human'. As a material and mechanical process, early printing made no exception to this general rule. Against the conventional wisdom of a technological triumph spreading freedom and knowledge, the history of the book is largely a story of errors and adjustments. Various mistakes normally crept in while texts were transferred from manuscript to printing formes and different emendation strategies were adopted when errors were spotted. In this regard, the 'Gutenberg galaxy' provides an unrivalled example of how scholars, publishers, authors and readers reacted to failure: they increasingly aimed at impeccability in both style and content, developed time and money-efficient ways to cope with mistakes, and ultimately came to link formal accuracy with authoritative and reliable information. Most of these features shaped the publishing industry until the present day, in spite of mounting issues related to false news and approximation in the digital age. Early modern misprinting, however, has so far received only passing mentions in scholarship and has never been treated together with proofreading in a complementary fashion. Correction benefited from a somewhat higher degree of attention, though check procedures in print shops have often been idealised as smooth and consistent. Furthermore, the emphasis has fallen on the people involved and their intervention in the linguistic and stylistic domains, rather than on their methodologies for dealing with typographical and textual mistakes. This book seeks to fill this gap in literature, providing the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary guide into the complex relationship between textual production in print, technical and human faults and more or less successful attempts at emendation. The 24 carefully selected contributors present new evidence on what we can learn from misprints in relation to publishers' practices, printing and pre-publication procedures, and editorial strategies between 1450 and 1650. They focus on texts, images and the layout of incunabula, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century books issued throughout Europe, stretching from the output of humanist printers to wide-ranging vernacular publications.

A Companion to Mistakes and In-House Corrections in Renaissance Europe (1450-1650)

Printing and Misprinting

A New History

The West

First Edition, Volume 1

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) was one of the most original, creative and exciting figures of the Italian Renaissance. He wrote the first modern treatise on painting, the first modern manual of classical architecture and a powerful set of 'dialogues' about the patrician families that dominated his home city of Florence. He rediscovered the forgotten aesthetics of classical architecture and described, in incomparably vivid terms, the artistic revolution in Florence that began what we now call the Renaissance. He made spectacular advances in the art of painting and in engineering, and as an architect he was responsible for some of the most exciting buildings in Italy.

Anthony Grafton

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