Milton gives way to Xbox, encyclopedias are forgotten for Wikipedia, and letters have been forgone for e-mails–yet intellectuals move on.  Anthony Grafton explores the past and future of scholarship.

Anthony Grafton –

Worlds Mades by Words: Scholarship and

Community in the Modern West

Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2009

Staff Book Review by Mark Cramer, Assistant Editor

            Throughout Worlds Made by Words, Professor Anthony Grafton – in the tradition of the thinkers and the works in which he immerses his audience – presents a volume that would make a valued addition to any library, from a colossal metropolitan institution to a scholar’s private collection. It is libraries, in fact, that inhabit a central role in all of Grafton’s essays; he continually reexamines the importance of libraries both in their ability to serve the lofty and erudite ideals of the Republic of Letters and in their continuing need to foster scholarship founded on traditional texts. Worlds Made by Words is also, in many ways, an autobiographical frame story. Scholarship and writing – be it classical, medieval, Renaissance, or modern – and the intellectual progress [or is it “progress”] of mankind form the portraiture around which Grafton creates the frame composed of vivid personal reminiscences and insights into such varied concerns as standards for modern journalists, shifts in historiographical methods, and the endangered existence of public intellectuals.

            Worlds Made by Words reveals itself to be a careful collection of essays about the people behind the words – the philologists, the historiographers, the long-extinct chronologers, the interdisciplinary scholars and the public intellectuals. These men and women forged connections and founded communities across the schisms of religious belief, the disparity of geographical locations, and the disunity of entrenched academic disciplines. Their correspondences, many of which have deteriorated into frail manuscripts after centuries of close study, reveal the intimate relationships between scholars struggling to solve the most significant intellectual challenges of their respective eras. Grafton’s paean to these scholars and their communities, however, is also a lament for the decline of the forms and conventions that governed their intellectual pursuits and interpersonal relationships.

            At times, Worlds Made by Words is the plea of a celebrated historian intimately familiar with the dusty, overflowing stacks of the world’s most revered libraries to assert the continued relevance of libraries to modern society. Although books are “dematerializing” through efforts at digitization, Grafton rightfully declares that the creation of a universal electronic library is unattainable. He never demonizes the work of institutions such as Google Books, JSTOR, or Project Muse; rather, he celebrates their ability to expose millions of new readers to spectacular sources, scholarly commentaries, and innovative research articles. Nevertheless, libraries should remain central to any historical research. To create “the richest possible mosaic” of historical sources, scholars will continue to inhabit the reading rooms of libraries “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”.

            Libraries will not only continue to be relevant – indeed, essential – for scholars; they will also serve as loci connecting the modern historian with their Western progenitors, the members of the Republic of Letters. The scholarly virtues and values of the Republic of Letters, constantly reshaped by technologies such as the printing press, will continue to encounter obstacles as they evolve and adapt to future academic and social environments. Changes in material context or the creation of a virtual academic community present challenges to the scholarly communities that Grafton studies. Or, we might fear, such changes may lead to the complete demise of the erudite principles of the Republic: Professor Grafton remarks on the rise of e-scholarship complete with its reliance on “a particular postmodern way of approaching texts: rapid, superficial, appropriative, and individualistic”. Mastering sources and developing firsthand knowledge has occasionally become secondary to creating polemics from manipulated texts. It is enough to drive true scholars into hiding.

            And yet, Grafton insists, the Republic provides the model for our generation to escape its miasma. Communities built around knowledge and dedicated to truth, regardless of its implications, can counter the increasingly hyperlinked world. Even the scholar Joseph Scaliger, often presented in biographies as being disengaged from academic communities and public life alike, emerges in one of Grafton’s essays as both a participant in and an active defender of the Republic of Letters and its values. Exchange between scholars – likeminded or not – was marked by civility. Scaliger, though a devout Calvinist in a time of general intolerance, nevertheless supported the work of Catholic historians and chronologers on the strength of their methods. Indeed, discourse flowed freely throughout Europe between diverse sets of scholars, a pattern of mutual academic engagement that persisted through the Enlightenment.

            With our present dependence on and use of the Internet, academics have endless possibilities for interdisciplinary work. Because we are many generations removed from the age of generalists, Grafton asserts that such academic cross-pollination is not only desired but also necessary for modern scholarship to thrive. Today’s specialists must continue to engage each other across all borders real and imagined. They, like their Republican predecessors, will shape intellectual communities into new forms and in turn be shaped by these new associations. An environment of courteous exchange between professional academics, whether in the form of encouragement or raw competition, spawns new knowledge in the continuing pursuit of the same truths sought by the members of the Republic of Letters. Technological advancement, then, has limited effects on individual understanding, for “even in the age of mass media, electronic databases, and search engines, local conditions still enable us to know certain things – and prevent us from knowing others.” Though our material context bears no semblance to that of the Republic of Letters, scholarly engagement within intellectual communities need not be so different from the example set by our humanist predecessors. Professor Grafton’s diagnosis of modern academia is grim, but his optimism for the future of scholarship remains: “Times have been, and are, dark. But even in dark times, the social worlds of scholarship provide room for human warmth and the desire and pursuit of the truth and promote deep scholarship and intelligent writing. And these abide.”

A new Republic may yet be looming.