Anthony Grafton

Anyone who teaches the High Renaissance in an American university knows how distant it has become. On first contemplating the nudes that fascinated tourists and connoisseurs for centuries, students shrug. Machiavelli and Guicciardini prove equally unexciting to young men and women who were born in the shadow of Watergate and are bored every night by the eleven o’clock news of Whitewater. They find nothing surprising in the assertion that great rulers cannot keep faith in the manner of ordinary people. Of all the alien worlds the teacher tries to call back to life, however, none seems more remote than that of the Renaissance court. True, students who read Burckhardt – as many still do – find nothing more fascinating than his accounts of courts and festivals. His analysis of how courtiers made their lives into works of art, consciously crafting every word and gesture to outdo their rivals and charm their superiors, fascinates those born less to be wild than to network.’

The sight that confronted the French Protestant d’Origny Delaloge when he left his London house at nine o’clock one morning in 1707 struck him as out of the ordinary. A fellow Huguenot, wearing a blond wig, a black suit with a damask vest and a hat with a rose on it, stood before the house and addressed him, first in English and then in French. He identified himself as Jean Le Clerc, the celebrated philologist and theologian from Holland who had edited the complete Latin works of Erasmus, produced a widely read periodical and written the first systematic modern manual of critical method, the Ars Critica. Explaining that he was travelling incognito, he nonetheless managed to reveal that he had come to occupy a chair in Oriental languages at Cambridge, his Latin inaugural lecture in his pocket. When Delaloge, who clearly found him impressive, invited him to dinner, Le Clerc spread himself in literary gossip, talking freely of the publishing houses and periodicals to which he enjoyed access. He even tried to appropriate a manuscript by Delaloge, which he promised to print in the Bibliothèque choisie. Only when foiled in this effort did Le Clerc finally leave, and even then he behaved oddly, insisting that he would walk after his puzzled host had called him a coach.

On the sprawling, minutely detailed historical paintings of the contemporary German artist Werner Tübke, preachers and prostitutes, humanists and soldiers, animated zodiacal signs and Popes tortured by devils tumble, gallop and fly past the onlooker. The flamboyantly dressed soldiers, needle-sharp lances, Hills of Golgotha and Towers of Babel that fill his works are carefully reproduced from dozens of well-known Renaissance paintings. Within the swirling clouds of detail, juxtapositions suggest interpretations. Mining machinery and printing presses of the time, for example, appear as complementary causes of the dissolution of the medieval social order and the doomed rising of thousands of German peasants in 1525. But the real effect of Tübke’s work lies in its power to evoke, in unforgettable detail, a moment of seismic historical change.

David McKitterick’s Printing and the Book Trade in Cambridge, 1534-1698 is the first of three projected volumes on the history of the book’s own publisher, the Cambridge University Press. Though the book stretches to 387 pages of text and almost another hundred pages of notes, it does not reach the point around 1700 when Richard Bentley reshaped the Press into a major player, as he tried to reshape Horace, Paradise Lost and Trinity College, where McKitterick is fellow and librarian. In the 1710s the appearance of Bentley’s Horace and Newton’s Principia on CUP’s list gave it extraordinary distinction. In the period that McKitterick addresses here, however, the University’s printers confined themselves to humbler tasks. Textbooks and tripos verses, dictionaries and almanacs, English Bibles, theological polemics and lawsuits against the London booksellers who regarded the existence of the Cambridge Press as an affront – these, not radical revisions of transmitted texts and world pictures, occupied the likes of Thomas Thomas and Cantrell Legge. Format and coverage conspire to make the book seem an exercise in that nostalgic obsession with the minutiae of the local past to which Cambridge dons succumb even more readily than their colleagues in other ancient seats of learning.’

Exactly a hundred years ago, Aby Warburg took a short walk on what proved to be a long pier. In his doctoral disseration on Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring, he used fewer than fifty packed pages to analyse the two paintings. He treated them as a set because Vasari had seen them both at Duke Cosmio’s villa, Castello, and described them together. Two points in particular worried Warburg, one stylistic and one substantive. Why had Botticelli, a painter whose natural bent lay in the portrayal of still, dreamy figures, here used ‘bewegtes Beiwerk’, fluttering hair and clothing, to give a sense of violent motion and emotions? And why had Botticelli decided to depict original combinations of myths drawn from Classical sources, like the Homeric Hymns and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, on so grand a scale?