From the first heady days of fifteenth-century incunabula, the Gutenberg
invention of the printed book, which wrote finis to handwritten manuscripts
and was the prime factor in advancing Renaissance humanism, continued, until
very recently, to dominate world culture as the one irreplaceable instrument
of cultural communication. But in the past decade or so the computer and the
internet have ushered in a revolution as fundamental as Gutenberg’s, and
rather more apocalyptic in its claims. Books are as dead as their paper, we
are told. Digital collections will not only replace but improve on them. In
2006 Kevin Kelley of Wired wrote in the New York Times that very soon “all
the books in the world” will “become a single liquid fabric of
interconnected words and ideas”. Counter-arguments were not slow in coming.
One of the best-informed, most thorough, and most truly passionate came, not
surprisingly, from Anthony Grafton: first in the pages of the New Yorker,
then – expanded and documented – as a pamphlet, Codex in Crisis, published
last year by the Crumpled Press; and now as the culminating essay in Worlds
Made by Words, a collection of mostly recent essays dealing with aspects of
the Republic of Letters (once a real, if virtual, humanist society) from the
Renaissance to the present day.
As an immensely learned devotee of the book in all its aspects, physical no
less than metaphysical (incidentally, the medium may be the message, but
there is not one word here about Marshall McLuhan), Grafton is well aware of
the historical company he is keeping, and of the political implications
involved: defenders of manuscripts against printed works warned that the
widespread and inexpensive dissemination of texts, biblical or other, would
not only vulgarize and vitiate the aristocracy of high scholarship, but put
undesirable ideas into the heads of the masses, who (of course) were not
intellectually equipped to understand them properly. So must the first
advocates of the Phoenician alphabet have been attacked by scribes trained
in pictographic systems or syllabaries. Nowadays the common complaints are
not all that different: blogs encourage creeping illiteracy, and – an
example that Grafton himself picks up – though a computer-generated
thesaurus may enable the scholar to display the kind of arcane references
once controlled only by a Scaliger or a Bentley, these are mere
top-dressing, and no proof of learning. As the philosopher Jonathan Barnes
says, a young scholar today too often “can cite anything and construe
nothing”.
It is much to Grafton’s credit that he has taken the trouble to acquaint
himself in detail with this new virtual world, and to sort out its
advantages as carefully as its unforeseen dangers. This evenhandedness is
particularly admirable since, as he is the first to admit, by instinct and
upbringing he is in love with the physical actualities of the old libraries
in which, from about 1960 onwards, he forged his distinguished academic
career. Some of the best and most vivid writing in this new book evokes the
ambience, patrons and “smells of dust and noble rot”, in havens ranging from
the Bodleian to the old British Library Reading Room, from the Bibliothèque
nationale in Paris (“a building that looks like the set from some forgotten
dystopian sci-fi film of the 1970s”) to the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,
each with its own unique character and perspective. This background
engenders a natural distrust, Grafton admits, of “any plan that treats books
as interchangeable and aims – as Google does – at universality”. But he at
once qualifies this by a candid admission: “One thing that Google Books
makes clearer every day is that you can study many aspects of French thought
and literature as deeply in New York as in Paris, and a lot more
efficiently”.
First with microfilms, now by widespread, if random, digitalization, texts of
every kind, from ancient papyri to modern specialist journals, have become
easily available to anyone with the right password, and very often without
even that. The picture of a researcher – say into Byzantine palaeography or
the mss of Euripides – being able to do most of his or her work at home, or
even on a remote Greek island, armed only with a sophisticated laptop and a
CD of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, is no longer a dream, but commonplace
reality. An editor at Cambridge University Press, reputedly the world’s
oldest publisher, cheerfully admitted to Grafton that, conservatively, “95
percent of all scholarly enquiries start at Google”. Which, as Grafton says,
“makes sense: Google, the nerdiest of corporations, has roots in the world
of books”, to the point where (if you throw in Amazon and one or two others)
“the Web has become a vast and vivid online bookstore”. The increasing
availability of this polyglot cornucopia, including rare and exotic material
previously restricted to major academic libraries, from all ages and every
corner of the globe, comes as a nearmiraculous blessing, and not only to
schools and universities. Today all would-be members of the Republic of
Letters, all hopeful explorers of past history, have, in a literal sense,
the world at their fingertips. As Grafton says, “it is more than
transformative to sit in your office at a small liberal arts or community
college and call up, as you already can, thousands of books in dozens of
languages, the nearest material copy of which is hundreds of miles away”.
That is the plus side, and Grafton gives it generous and informed credit. But
he also has an eye for computerized weaknesses. It is the glitches that make
easy targets, and precise scholars tend to obsess about them. Scanning by
optical character recognition, ironically, commits some of the same errors
as those made by careless medieval scribes, including long “s” read as “f”
(German scholarship sometimes appears as Wiffenschaft), and the confusion of
u and n. Thus, key in the meaningless qnalitas for qualitas (a key term in
medieval philosophy) and you get over 600 hits for qualitas which you would
miss if you only keyed in the correct word. Much of the old German spiky
Gothic black-letter material (Fraktur) comes out in “plain text” as
gobbledegook. Cataloguing, too, can be incomplete, confusing or wrong-headed
(why should one central concept of an old Baedeker Paris guide be the
fauteuil?). More seriously, Google’s universalist aims lack overall
planning, and the project “accordingly operates less as a vast, coherent
ordering machine than as a gigantic fire hose dousing the world’s readers
with texts untouched by human hands or minds” (Grafton’s metaphors, when
collected, shed an intriguing light on his personality). Many
out-of-copyright books are still unavailable, and Google has no plans to
cover the first two centuries of printing.
The further one trawls into the past, the clearer it becomes that, as Grafton
says, “whatever happens on screen, the great libraries of the Northern
Hemisphere will remain irreplaceable for a long time”, and one of Google’s
most excellent services is already as a guide to finding material in them
rather than providing that material itself. “The real challenge now”, we
learn, in another striking metaphor, “is how to chart the tectonic plates of
information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate
the new landscapes they are creating.” The conclusion Grafton reaches is
that while the recent present will “become overwhelmingly accessible”
online, for the past we still need a painstaking hands-on approach in the
archives themselves. The transfer of documentary archives – even those of
the US or the UK – to the web is still in its infancy, and Grafton makes a
strong case for the need to consult originals rather than digitized images:
one researcher traced the history of cholera outbreaks by sniffing letters
in a 250-year-old archive to see which had been sprinkled with vinegar in
the hope of disinfecting them. Yes, the young scholar is told, take every
advantage of the new electronic Aladdin’s cave. But – and here Grafton shows
a rare moment of deeply felt emotion – these streams of data, rich as they
are, will illuminate rather than eliminate the unique books and prints and
manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. For now, and for
the foreseeable future, if you want to piece together the richest possible
mosaic of documents and texts and images, you will have to do it in those
crowded public rooms where sunlight gleams on varnished tables, as it has
for more than a century, and knowledge is still embodied in millions of
dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable manuscripts and books.
It is from that traditional vantage point that Grafton, Renaissance scholar
extraordinaire, has, for the past forty years or so, dispassionately and
indefatigably investigated the intellectual activities of the great early
humanists. As he himself remarks of Arnaldo Momigliano (1908–87), the
remarkable, and eccentric, ancient historian whom in several ways he
resembles, it would be unwise to assume there was any work of scholarship,
from any period, in any European language, with which he is is unfamiliar.
Most of the other essays in Worlds Made by Words offer a generous sampling,
in roughly chronological order, from his learned forays into “the recondite
field that I cultivate” (which, as most readers may be surprised to learn,
has an indispensable website called White Trash Scriptorium). The names and
debates will sometimes be unfamiliar to non-specialists. Leon Battista
Alberti on historia in art as humanistic “rhetoric in paint”; his friend
Flavio Biondo, antiquarian and proto-archaeologist; the Benedictine abbot
and book collector Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), also a brilliant and
prolific forger, allegedly on the basis of “angelic dictation”: these and
others like them rub shoulders in Grafton’s pages with more familiar figures
such as Scaliger, Casaubon, Bacon (inter alia, apropos Salomon’s House in
The New Atlantis as a typical new “museum of natural history”) and Kepler
(chiefly for his pioneering work on ancient chronology, much of which was,
inevitably, alarming to religious bien pensants).
More immediately accessible is a vigorous (and to me very welcome) defence of
humanist Latin as a still-viable scholarly lingua franca, launched as part
of Grafton’s enthusiastic welcome to the initial volumes of the I Tatti
Renaissance Library. As an instrument, it had to break away from the very
different liturgical, legal and medical Latin of the Middle Ages; and this
it triumphantly did, against considerable opposition, becoming “a revived
classical language, purist and discriminating”, based on a close verbal
familiarity, almost inconceivable today, with the major poets and prose
writers of Republican and Augustan Rome (the Flemish philologist Justus
Lipsius “offered to recite the text of Tacitus with a knife held to his
throat, to be plunged in if he made a mistake”). Armed with this powerful
scholarly vox generalis, Petrarch, Boccaccio and others set about retrieving
the culture that had first employed it. They hunted down the manuscripts of
lost texts. They practised ancient genres long forgotten: epic, history,
epistolography (Maffeo Vegio added an elegantly pastiched thirteenth book,
complete with happy ending, to Virgil’s Aeneid). They promoted the secular
teaching of classics, encouraged the making of classical libraries, got
classicists into key positions as ambassadors and administrators. Their
Latin works were admired and imitated by writers from Sir Thomas Browne to
Samuel Johnson.
Most important of all, in a rigidly hierarchical world, founded on theological
dogma enforced, in the last resort, by torture and execution, they upheld –
often at great risk to themselves – the sovereign virtues of rational
discourse, employed in the pursuit of rational answers to the most pressing
questions of their age. The one thing they worshipped was truth: a truth
“revealed” only in the sense of having been arrived at by a process of
impartial inquiry. Today this endeavour is too often disregarded because of
the inevitable emotional bias it contained: but a world still in the violent
grip of assorted ideologies surely cannot afford to patronize men whose
pursuit of astronomical or chronological truth challenged, with ultimate
success, the mythical and cosmic basis of their society. As Grafton shows us
(without ever quite pinpointing the significance of the conjunction), in the
Renaissance, and for some while after, scientists and humanists worked in
common pursuit of the same goal. Today, we see scientists still to a great
degree (with notable exceptions) pitted against religious authority, whereas
during the past couple of centuries humanists (again with notable
exceptions) have been cleverly co-opted on to the side of upper-class
governance.
It is this rational, egalitarian, meritocratic ideal that still exercises its
powerful intellectual appeal to scholars today, and Grafton shows himself
wholeheartedly committed to it. As he is well aware, then as now, the
outside world operated by very different rules. Violence, ethnic prejudice,
dogmatic authoritarianism and corrupt power-broking were endemic. The
attraction of the still small voice of reason amid all the conflicting angry
ideologies is obvious. But there is a built-in danger here too, to which
Grafton is not entirely impervious. In a recent issue of the TLS (June 5),
Jonathan Keates analysed a self-portrait by Aby Warburg (one of Grafton’s
heroes) as a symbol of his deep neurosis, conveying an image “of someone
seeking protection rather than tranquility among the assembled volumes and
scrolls”.
Grafton’s great libraries sometimes seem to be offering him a similar retreat,
and this is an attitude with which I have some sympathy. He is, of course,
well aware (and cannot help at times revealing) that his scholars could be
as quirky, eccentric and prejudiced as the next man. The trouble is that he
does his best, as a result, to show them, in their pursuit of philological
or historical truth, as intellects alone, mens et praeterea nihil, with all
the messy diurnal emotionalism so fundamental (like it or not) to their
lives largely suppressed as irrelevant: humanism minus humanity. There is a
deep longing here for a world where arguments are always settled by peaceful
debate, where emotions never trump logic, where no one gets violent, or
shouts, or is diverted from the path of reason by sex, money or faith. In
that brilliant study Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and scholarship in
literature and the popular imagination (2003), A. D. Nuttall came to the
conclusion that scholarship and life “are, if not opposed, strangely
separate”. Grafton’s essays help us to understand why.
What, then, is the true legacy of the Republic of Letters in its pursuit of
truth? For scholars, the answer has always been clear. The giants of
Renaissance humanism retrieved, in the teeth of medieval opposition, that
Graeco-Roman, essentially secular, world view, along with much of its
literature, that was in danger of perishing altogether, or at the very least
of surviving only as stunted religious allegory and misunderstood moral
aphorisms. Linguistic experts with limitless energy and seemingly eidetic
memories – Scaliger claimed to have digested and stored away all Greek
literature in two or three years, a kind of early search engine with a
critical brain – not only cleaned up manuscripts (over 700 of the worst
errors in Catullus got removed before 1650), but laid the foundations which
made the great reference works such as Liddell and Scott or Pauly–Wissowa
possible. “We are still”, no less a scholar than Wilamowitz insisted, in his
Geschichte der Philologie, “living on the capital accumulated by the
industry of Casaubon.” True; but how many people care?
The trouble today, as Tom Stoppard’s wonderful play about A. E. Housman, The
Invention of Love, makes all too clear, is that for most of us, educated or
not, a lifetime spent fiddling with the texts of long-dead elitist white
male writers no longer fires the imagination. There are also the attacks of
postcolonialism, which is always glad to remind us that Aristotle provided
one of the best arguments in favour of slavery, and that (post hoc, ergo
propter hoc?) Basil Gildersleeve, by general agreement the finest American
classicist of the nineteenth century, fought vigorously for the South in the
Civil War. As a result, we are tempted to lose sight of the original
Renaissance ideal: that generic quest after truth through reason, against
all the hazards set up by dogma, ideology, political dictates and (most of
all) endemic human emotional weakness.
This may be why I derived particular pleasure from reading Roger H. Martin’s
Racing Odysseus, an extraordinary memoir with the explanatory subtitle A
college president becomes a freshman again. And not an ordinary freshman:
Martin, over sixty, and recovering from surgery for metastasized melanoma,
enrolled at, of all places, St John’s College in Annapolis. As Grafton
reminds us, the great Renaissance literati “were the last Europeans who
could plausibly claim that they were masters of their entire civilization”.
Nothing daunted, St John’s sets its students on a gruelling course of study
that covers most of what those polymaths read, and more: in addition to
Homer, the Greek tragedians, and large amounts of Plato and Aristotle,
freshmen get their arithmetic from Nicomachus, their geometry from Euclid,
and their chemistry from Lavoisier. Fired by the Greek obsession with
physical fitness – and a typical Boomer reluctance to abandon youth – Martin
also made it, despite his medical record, into a college rowing team.
Despite the obvious criticisms, duly noted – too few women writers or
non-European cultures – what we get here, in an enthusiastic, breathless and
oddly innocent narrative, is a welcome reminder of what real Western
education, as opposed to mere vocational training, is about: the constant
exercise of the mind in discovering, appreciating and debating major
thinkers and artists, past and present; the exploration of key moral,
aesthetic and political issues; above all, gaining a historical perspective
on our (very real) European roots, perhaps the most effective antidote to
the current all too pervasive malaise of presentism. We may know more today
than the giants of the Great Books (though even that remains highly
debatable); but they are still, as T. S. Eliot’s aphorism insists, that
which we know. Thirty years of life in academe, with forays into publishing
and the media, Grafton admits, “have sometimes left me shaken, even
despairing”. Maybe a semester at St John’s, rowing included, would cheer him
up.
Anthony Grafton
WORLDS MADE BY WORDS
Scholarship and community in the modern west
422pp. Harvard University Press. £22.95 (US $29.95).
978 0 674 03257 8
Roger H. Martin
RACING ODYSSEUS
A college president becomes a freshman again
262pp. University of California Press. $24.95;distributed in the UK by Wiley.
£17.95.
978 0 520 25541 8
Peter Green is Professor Emeritus of Classics in the University of
Texas at Austin. His most recent book is The Hellenistic Age: A short
history, 2007.
