“[An] extraordinary book.” —New Republic 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 the world of books. With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto Eco, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning—and adds this ancient lore to the well-known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek. The mystery begins with Mark Pattison’s nineteenth-century biography of Casaubon. Here we encounter the Protestant Casaubon embroiled in intellectual quarrels with the Italian and Catholic orator Cesare Baronio. Setting out to understand the nature of this imbroglio, Grafton and Weinberg discover Casaubon’s knowledge of Hebrew. Close reading and sedulous inquiry were Casaubon’s tools in recapturing the lost learning of the ancients—and these are the tools that serve Grafton and Weinberg as they pore through pre-1600 books in Hebrew, and through Casaubon’s own manuscript notebooks. Their search takes them from Oxford to Cambridge, from Dublin to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they reveal how the scholar discovered the learning of the Hebrews—and at what cost.
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Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Grafton and Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of legendary Renaissance scholar Isaac Casaubon’s already celebrated achievement.
This book is nothing short of a masterpiece, combining in an unprecedented way sound philological expertise with historical ingenuity and creativity. The rediscovery of Casaubon as a dedicated student of Jewish learning will revolutionize the history of Christian Hebraism.
Les mer
This book is nothing short of a masterpiece, combining in an unprecedented way sound philological expertise with historical ingenuity and creativity. The rediscovery of Casaubon as a dedicated student of Jewish learning will revolutionize the history of Christian Hebraism. -- Peter Schafer, Princeton University I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue is a wonderful work of scholarship and a sheer delight to read. The book is significant beyond the authors' brilliant reconstruction of Isaac Casaubon's Hebraic passions. It provides a model on how to study Hebrew and Aramaic texts alongside Greek and Latin ones to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. It illustrates what exciting rewards exist for the industrious scholar willing to peruse hand-written journals and scribbled annotations on the pages of printed books. Both Grafton and Weinberg acknowledge their debts to their late teacher Arnaldo Momigliano, the great classical scholar. He especially would have appreciated their remarkable collaborative achievement. -- David B. Ruderman, University of Pennsylvania In the new story told by these two eminent authorities, Casaubon remains the great Hellenist known to Pattison, but he becomes much more. He is now a pioneering student of Hebrew texts and a Christian ascetic who turned Hellenic and Hebrew philology into Protestant piety...The book underlines the importance of late antiquity and early Christianity, which until recently, were not very visible in Anglophone scholarship: Grafton and Weinberg go far to reveal the roots of this exciting field. -- Brian Copenhaver, University of California, Los Angeles
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780674048409
Publisert
2011-01-03
Utgiver
Vendor
The Belknap Press
Høyde
254 mm
Bredde
175 mm
Aldersnivå
UP, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
392

Om bidragsyterne

Anthony Grafton is the author of The Footnote, Defenders of the Text, Forgers and Critics, and Inky Fingers, among other books. The Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University, he writes regularly for the New York Review of Books. Joanna Weinberg is Reader in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford.