Worlds made by words
Subtitle: scholarship and community in the modern West
By: Anthony Grafton.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 422
ISBN-13: 9780674032576
Subjects: Learning and scholarship -- Europe, Western -- History; Learning and scholarship -- United States -- History; Europe -- Civilization; Europe -- Intellectual life
Description: "In this book Anthony Grafton lets us in on one of the great secrets of scholars and intellectuals: although scholars lead solitary lives in order to win independence of mind, they also enjoy the conviviality of sharing a project sustained by common ideals, practices, and institutions. It's like Masonry, but without the secret handshakes. Grafton reveals the microdynamics of the scholarly life through a series of essays on institutions and on scholars ranging from early modern polymaths to modern intellectual historians to American thinkers and writers."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: A sketch map of a lost continent: the republic of letters; title: A humanist crosses boundaries: Alberti on "historia" and "istoria"; title: A contemplative scholar: Trithemius conjures the past; title: The world in a room: Renaissance histories of art and nature; title: Where was Salomon's house? Ecclesiastical history and the intellectual origins of Bacon's new Atlantis; title: Chronology, controversy, and community in the republic of letters: the case of Kepler; title: The universal language: splendors and sorrows of Latin in the modern world; title: Entrepreneurs of the soul, impresarios of learning: the Jesuits; title: In no man's land: Christian learning and the Jews; title: The history of ideas: precept and practice, 1950-2000 and beyond; title: The Messrs. Casaubon: Isaac Casaubon and Mark Pattison; title: Momigliano's method and the Warburg Institute: studies in his middle period; title: The public intellectual and the American university: Robert Morss Lovett; title: The public intellectual and the private sphere: Arendt and Eichmann at the dinner table; title: Codex in crisis: the book dematerializes; title: Notes; title: Sources; title: Index.