Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (review)

Anthony Grafton is a very prolific scholar of the history of scholarship itself, especially that of early modern Europe. Beginning with his Chicago dissertation (1975) on Joseph Scaliger (published in two volumes as Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–1993]) he has given us books both erudite and entertaining on such subjects as The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Christianity and the Transformation of the Book (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Alongside such scholarly monographs, Grafton regularly contributes articles to periodicals of general (if not popular) appeal such as The American Scholar and The New York Review of Books. This latest book is chiefly a collection of these articles, loosely tied together under the theme of "the Republic of Letters." The connections are loose indeed, but the subject of Grafton's work should be of interest to academic librarians for its treatment of the evolution and perturbations of the scholarly enterprise through history. In fact, libraries are the bookends of the collection, beginning with the admiration that the Huguenot scholar Isaac Casaubon showed for the then recently opened Bodleian Library because, although its collections were not so rich as those of the royal library in Paris, the books did not circulate and thus were always available. The final chapter (an enlargement of a 2007 article in The New Yorker), "Codex in Crisis: The Book Dematerializes," addresses the promises and perils of digitization and its effects on libraries and on scholarship in general. It should be read by all academic librarians, as well as by our teaching and research faculty, for its evenhanded treatment of the subject.

Grafton's portrait of Arnaldo Momigliano (with whom he once studied) shows how Momigliano's method of working has inspired Grafton himself. They both focus on individual scholars and bring them to life through anecdotes that reveal their virtues and their foibles. Such is the essay on Johannes Trithemius, who stands accused of fabricating manuscript sources for his published historical works. When asked to produce a manuscript, he suggests that the monastery must have sold that book since he used it. Trithemius, who courted and flattered the emperor Maximilian, stands in stark contrast to Robert Morss Lovett, who risked his position at the University of Chicago by taking principled but unpopular stands. "Lovett and his wife left the academic society of Hyde Park and moved into an apartment in Jane Addams's settlement house in the slums, Hull House, which they greatly preferred to the polite suburbs. Lovett worked the switchboard two nights a week and taught classes for immigrants." (p. 266)

Another essay treats Francis Bacon's vision (in his New Atlantis) of a massive research institute that would collect data from all over the world and subject it to analysis by a large group of scholars working cooperatively, a vision that Grafton suggests was inspired by just such an enterprise established by the Reformation scholar Matthias Flacius Illyricus, who with a team of scholars produced a massive and polemical history of the Church. Another is a more personal recollection of the controversy over Hannah Arendt and her Eichmann in Jerusalem and of a magazine article that Grafton's father was asked to write but which was never published because Arendt, feeling besieged, decided not to cooperate.

Grafton's work is useful to librarians because he shows how scholars have worked, and continue to work, over the past four centuries. Their needs have been the same—mainly good libraries and archives—and their methods and results depend greatly on the nature of the resources at their disposal. He points out how the availability of digital books has changed the way scholars work. I have seen this myself with the students with whom I have worked (and in my own children), who use the Web like a fishing pond, pulling their choice catch...