This volume is the first half of an intellectual biography of Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), the greatest classical scholar of his time. Anthony Grafton describes Scaliger's early work as an editor of and commentator on classical texts, setting this into the wider context of classical scholarship in the Renaissance. At the same time he interprets the major changes that Scaliger's work underwent, as responses to pressures exerted by his social situation and emotional life.

Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. Volume I: Textual Criticism and Exegesis (Oxford-Warburg Studies)

Literature & Fiction

Grafton, Anthony

History & Criticism

Clarendon Press

This book describes the later life of Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), the most original scholar of the late Renaissance. It concentrates on his efforts to date the main events of ancient and medieval history, a study that required him to use both astronomical data and philological methods. Volume I of this study was published in 1983, and received wide critical attention.

Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. Volume II: Historical Chronology (Oxford-Warburg Studies)

Biographies & Memoirs

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.

Obelisk: A History (Publications of the Burndy Library)

Arts & Photography

Long, Pamela O.

Curran, Brian A.

Weiss, Benjamin

The MIT Press

The West: A New History

Two outstanding historians rebuild the West at the center of the Western Civilizations course 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.

History

Bell, David A.

Europe

W.W.Norton&Company

Two outstanding historians rebuild the West at the center of the Western Civilizations course 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.

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