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The style of reading in Renaissance Europe, as seen in the margins of books and in the texts of Renaissance intellectuals themselves, is deftly charted in this welcome volume from Anthony Grafton. Growing out of the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures that Anthony Grafton gave at the University of Michigan in 1992, this book describes the interaction between books and readers in the Renaissance, as seen in four major case studies.Humanists Alberti, Pico, Budé, and Kepler, all major figures of their time and now major figures in intellectual history, are examined in the light of their distinctive ways of reading. Investigating a period of two centuries, Grafton vividly portrays the ways in which book/scholar interactions--and the established traditions that were reflected in these interactions--were part of and helped shape the subjects' Humanistic philosophy. The book also indicates how these traditions have implications for the modern literary scene.Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers illustrates the immense variety of the humanist readers of the Renaissance. Grafton describes life in the Renaissance library, how the act of reading was shaped by the physical environment, and various styles of reading during the time. A strong sense of what skilled reading was like in the past is built up through anecdotes, philological analysis, and documents from a wide variety of sources, many of them unpublished.This volume will be of special interest to Renaissance and intellectual historians, students of Renaissance literature, and classicists who concern themselves with the afterlife of their texts.Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University.

An accessible exploration of the methodology of the history of reading.

Few articles in the humanities have had the impact of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s seminal “Studied for Action,” a study of the reading practices of Elizabethan polymath and prolific annotator Gabriel Harvey. Their excavation of the setting, methods, and ambitions of Harvey’s encounters with his books ignited a new interdisciplinary field, the history of reading, which quickly became one of the most exciting corners of the scholarly cosmos. A generation inspired by the model of Harvey fanned out across the world’s libraries and archives, seeking to reveal the many creative, unexpected, and curious ways that individuals throughout history responded to texts, and how these interpretations, in turn, illuminate past worlds.

Three decades on, Harvey’s example and Jardine’s work remain central to cutting-edge scholarship in the history of reading. By uniting “Studied for Action” with new studies on Gabriel Harvey, some of which are published here for the first time, by Jardine, Grafton, and the scholars they have influenced, this collection provides a unique lens on the place of marginalia in textual, intellectual, and cultural history. The chapters capture subsequent work on Harvey and map the fields opened by Jardine and Grafton’s original article, collectively offering a posthumous tribute to Lisa Jardine and an authoritative overview of the History of Reading.