The Making of the Humanities

Abstract

When we think of the humanities in early modern times we are usually thinking about school and academy syllabi that were built up on the specific tradition of European Latinitas. This was the central concern of the widely. discussed 1986 book by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in 15^(th) and 16^(th) Century Europe. Their central argument, that the humanities started with scholars like Peter Ramus, who unhinged humanist teaching from its moral foundations, is subsumed beneath an altogether different view of the beginning of the humanities in this collective volume, The Making of the Humanities. Writing about early modern humanities in this book is synonymous with writing about a bunch of disciplines that came into being much later. The authors treat the humanities as traditions of specific knowledge that are connected to politics and scholarly practices, of which teaching is not the pivotal one. Eighteen case studies describe correcting, streaming, gathering, transferring knowledge in fields preceding those that came to be called the humanities in the nineteenth century. Contributors take a comparative view in order to build contexts with other fields and discuss different methods and formats. Protagonists include the polymath Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (ca. 1601-80), and the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-77). The strength of this book lies in the way it connects these well-known profiles to lesser-known figures, and in its discussion of those fields, including the visual arts, linguistics, and history, that had scarcely been defined among the artes liberales in the humanism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As this book shows, the significance of these disciplines for the academy grew immensely in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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