Anthony Grafton

A revelatory new account of the magus and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe. At the heart of the extraordinary ferment of the High Renaissance stood a distinctive, strange, and beguiling figure—the magus. An unstable mix of scientist, bibliophile, engineer, fabulist, and fraud, the magus ushered in modern physics and chemistry while also working...

A panoramic history of the antiquarians whose discoveries transformed Renaissance culture and gave rise to new forms of art and knowledge In the early fifteenth century, a casket containing the remains of the Roman historian Livy was unearthed at a Benedictine abbey in Padua. The find was greeted with the same enthusiasm as the bones of a Christian saint, and...

"Describes magnificent achievements, storms of controversy, and sometimes the pure devilment of scholars and printers. Captivating and often amusing."- Wall Street Journal "Ideas, in this vivid telling, emerge not just from minds but from hands, not to mention the biceps that crank a press or heft a ream of paper."- New York Review of Books "As usual, Grafton presents largely...

Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar's already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot's Middlemarch. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in...

A revelatory new account of the magus - the learned magician - and his place in the intellectual, social and cultural world of Renaissance Europe. At the heart of the extraordinary ferment of the High Renaissance stood a distinctive, strange and beguiling figure - the magus. An unstable mix of scientist, bibliophile, engineer, fabulist and fraud, the magus ushered in...