Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2: Historical Chronology.

Anthony Grafton. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. xviii + 766 pp. $98.

With this volume Anthony Grafton completes, after a decade's work, his intellectual biography of Joseph Scaliger. The new volume is huge and complex, covering a wide variety of mostly unfamiliar materials, often highly technical and at the time deeply controversial. It is packed with detail of textual exegesis and its local battles, with the unedifying passions of contemporary quarrel, with analyses of calendars, dating, and chronological calculus, and worth the often yet more technical disputes over matters astronomical and astrological. Pleasures are sometimes antiquarian: corrected computations, new textual datings, novel associations. But at issue is a main step on the bridge to modernity, from a sense of humanity as a "whole" and continuity within a time of limited span, however obscurely grasped, to that of a fragmented humankind, defined by variety and contrast, erring in a time and space whose bounds could not be fixed. The first supposes a single overarching historical knowledge -- a "wisdom of the ages." The second imposes a series of separate knowings, whose unity might be hard to grasp.

Scaliger was working toward the first in his vast Opus novum de emendatione temporum (1583). This came after twenty years' work on the more typical humanist project of discovering, editing, and commenting on the writings of Greek and Roman Antiquity. It was these projects that by the late 1570s forced him to treat chronology and history. He was now interested too in ancient (and modern) rituals, problems of world history, growingly urgent disputes over national origins, and such. The Emendatio was a technical treatise comparing many calendars and temporal cycles: Greek, Babylonian, Jewish, Arabic, Saxon, Egyptian, Roman, Christian and others (145-357). With its "errors, forced readings, and misinterpretations," it "opened up a richer body of texts and a wider range of questions to apply to them than any previous work or group of works" (177). Still, his calculations were criticized by Kepler, Tycho, Clavius, and others. More or less politely, all showed his incompetence in mathematics, so that even as he provided a frame for calculating firm datings and outlined a still surviving "research programme for chronology and a disciplinary history" underpinning it (253), he revealed how breaks were opening between disciplines.

Between 1583 and 1593, when he took Lipsius's place at Leiden, Scaliger was much affected by the French civil wars, although the enforced desultoriness of his reading did lead to later expansion of earlier works, notably with materials on China and Meso-America in the Emendatio's second edition of 1598 (394-459). Before this, in 1594, he printed "solutions" to three problems that had puzzled geometers from Antiquity: squaring the circle, finding proportional means between lines, and trisecting an angle (378). Having couched these as a challenge to working mathematicians, despite his lack of expertise, he invited universally hostile reaction. Henry Savile concluded that he neither knew geometry nor how to use method (382-83). Even so, for the Emendatio's second edition he benefitted both from positive criticism by Arabists and Hebraists and from Tycho's friendly technical corrections (469-77). Aside from one more foray into matters scientific (not printed in his lifetime), Scaliger now concentrated his last attack on the historical sources, at last realizing the deficiency of his command of scientific methods, and understanding that the virtues of historical knowledge were different from the natural philosophical ones of rationally regulated analysis.

His vast subject-indexes to the new Corpus inscriptionum, the first of their kind, appeared in 1602. He was also preparing his Thesaurus temporum (1606), centered on a new edition of Eusebius's Chronicles not from Jerome but reconstructed from a manuscript of Syncellus's Greek Chronicon Paschale (514-743). To achieve this Scaliger had to demonstrate for the first time how to understand and derive a manuscript tradition, provide a stemma, grasp a developmental chronology, and explain differences (519-27). Just so, making his indexes for the Corpus, he had created "one of the most powerful tools for information-retrieval that classical scholars had until the twentieth century" (505). However ambiguous his own editorial results, these were basic achievements in critical and philological methodology which were to remain essentially stable for 400 years. In his own case, they grounded a kind of encyclopedia of world history. He was able to show that certain major received texts were forgeries, but also that this did not mean that all their material was necessarily to be rejected. He showed what material was genuine and what was not by comparing many different sources against one another. To do that required the editorial and textual certainties that his new methods were seeking to establish. He knew his world history was not finished, and that he could not make it so. It now needed new ways of analyzing and knowing, in combinations that perhaps no one person could any longer hope to control. He (and others) had lost hope of compiling an explanatory history of humanity. Separate professional and ever more mutually closed sciences had begun going their way, and what hope of unity remained would be judged to lie not in universal history but in the powers of human reason.

By inventing methods for the scientific editing of manuscripts and texts, rules for explaining differences and making comparisons and ways for enabling retrieval of materials, and by insisting that any document, Old and New Testaments included, was fodder for exegesis, meriting regard only as verified by other sources -- Scaliger created basic techniques of historiographical research. He defined a field according to the rules and expectations of its study, making it coherent in its claims and goals. This may have happened because his experience showed the need to split areas of competence. In natural scientific observation and mathematics, he had to trust others' expertise, just as others -- such as Tycho -- had to trust the expertise he wielded over his own realm. A new scholarly community might have been born: one that did not assume a sharing of like expertise, but carried a mix and exchange of diverse ones: Tychonic astronomy putting its scientific rules and data at the service of Scaligerian textual analysis. This book is an exemplar -- a fine "archeology" of the humanist enterprise in its textual and "scientific" embodiments.