Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800.

This collection of essays, as Anthony Grafton explains in his introduction, challenges the historical orthodoxy which describes science and humanism as two distinct cultures at war with one another. The traditional account shows an impoverished Renaissance classicism giving way to the New Science of the seventeenth century, only to be transformed after the French Revolution by modern philology as it developed in Germany. In Grafton's revision, the two cultures coexisted and often collaborated throughout this period, so that humanists analyzed scientific texts and scientists contributed to supposedly humanistic fields like textual exegesis and cultural history.

The nine essays collected here are presented as case studies selected to illuminate this issue. In "Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts," Grafton shows how the humanists developed two different ways of reading the classics, one designed to make an old text relevant to modern life, the other to interpret it as it would have been understood within the culture in which it was produced. "The Scholarship of Poliziano and Its Context" describes a revolution in this second, philological style of reading, for Angelo Poliziano, the famous Florentine scholar, developed the modern method of arranging both manuscripts and historical sources genealogically in order to eliminate derivative evidence. The path from the Renaissance to modernity, however, is not always straight, as we see in "Traditions of Invention and Inventions of Tradition in Renaissance Italy: Annius of Viterbo," an essay which shows how the rules for the systematic evaluation of sources were permanently refined by one of the greatest forgers of the Renaissance. In "Scaliger's Chronology: Philology, Astronomy, World History," Grafton shows how Scaliger's work in this area drew on both science and humanism to reduce the establishment of dates to a technical problem, solvable without reference to theology or astrology. Technical refinements also allowed Isaac Casaubon to reassess the Hermetic Corpus and the Sibylline prophecies, as we learn in "Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus" and "The Strange Deaths of Hermes and the Sibyls." "Humanism and Science in Rudolphine Prague: Kepler in Context," in turn, shows that our modern disciplinary boundaries make it difficult for us to see Kepler as both a distinguished humanist and a brilliant scientist; nevertheless, both cultures still formed "parts of the same vast Mannerist garden" (203). The last two essays show how scholars of the past could also move freely between the classics and another part of Grafton's garden: biblical studies. "Isaac La Peyrere and the Old Testament" explores this movement at the intersection of high and low culture, and "Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf" explores it as part of the effort to breathe new life into the study of the classics in eighteenth-century Halle.

Even a bald summary suggests that some of this material has little direct bearing on the relationship between science and humanism, and that there are obvious gaps in the story as Grafton tells it. This is due, I suspect, to the fact that the essays were originally written over a twenty-year period as separate studies - something which Grafton freely acknowledges. But if the book fails to present a thorough, tightly unified argument in support of its thesis, it does collect in one place a group of elegantly written essays whose attention to irony and complexity warns us not to oversimplify our account of the past. There is a place in Grafton's story for Melchior Goldast as well as for Johannes Kepler, methodological advances are duly attributed to scoundrels as well as saints, and scholarly moves are shown occasionally to have reinforced the very beliefs they were designed to challenge.

In sum: the train from Florence does eventually arrive in Halle, but the ticket Grafton is selling is not direct, nor are stops allowed at every point along the way. That offers both advantages and disadvantages, but enough of the former to make this trip well worth taking.

Craig Kallendorf TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY