Anthony Grafton

Oct 30, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Richard Lea |Kathryn Harkup |Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow |Anthony Grafton

It is hard to admit when we don’t know something. We often prefer to flannel or fabricate than to say we don’t have the answer. According to the philosopher Andy Clark, this tendency to invent runs deep. We perceive the world by constructing mental models and seeing where those models don’t apply – an account of perception that suggests illusions are simply ordinary cognitive processing confronted with extraordinary situations.

Oct 6, 2024 | academic.oup.com | Anthony Grafton

ERRORS IN PRINTING ARE ALMOST AS OLD as the printed word. For instance, a range of some in the copy of the 42-line Bible at Frankfurt was illustrated by Gerhardt Powitz in 1990. We live with errors today, partly reborn as a consequence of the inadequacies of optical character recognition whether in scans of books to read on our screens or in attempts to mine historical texts which are thus compromised as evidence.

Jul 6, 2024 | daily.jstor.org | Matthew Wills |Anthony Grafton

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. “The history of the footnote may well seem an apocalyptically trivial topic,” writes historian Anthony Grafton. “Footnotes seem to rank among the most colorless and uninteresting features of historical practice.” And yet, Grafton—who has also written The Footnote: A Curious History (1999)—argues that they’re actually pretty important.

May 1, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Carlos Eire |Anthony Grafton |Malcolm Gaskill

Teresa of Ávila​ was a late starter, but that was no bad thing for a paragon of piety. A perplexed or misspent adolescence emphasised the transforming power of grace in both Catholic hagiography and puritan conversion narratives. She was born into a Castilian merchant family in 1515, but her fortunes were compromised by her family’s dubious status. Her converso grandfather was suspected by the Inquisition, leaving Teresa’s father to buy his way into respectable society.

Mar 1, 2024 | literaryreview.co.uk | Anthony Grafton

‘Read with care and precision, dear reader, and you will marvel and will not be sorry.’ So advises a Latin note scribbled in 1550 by a Benedictine monk into his copy of Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (1533), a book promising full reform of the ‘sublime and sacred science’ of magic. Alas, not everyone was so enthusiastic: Agrippa’s book was condemned as heretical by the inquisitor of Cologne. At the same time, it received approbation from the city’s archbishop.