Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest

Fellow Scholars

In the opening pages of Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Harvard University Press, 2009), Princeton historian Anthony Grafton evokes the Huguenot Hellenist Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), an ascetic, seemingly solitary scholar. Despite his preference for a life alone with books, Casaubon wrote enthusiastically to a friend about finding himself in the company of fellow scholars on a visit to Oxford’s Bodleian Library in May 1613: “You would see many scholars there, eagerly enjoying the feasts spread before them. This gave me no little pleasure.” Grafton closes his book evoking another library, urging the digitally astute scholar to pry himself away from the screen to “take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stone stairs” (323) of the New York Public.

Worlds Made by Wordsis an amiable gathering of