Anthony Grafton (sometimes Anthony T. Grafton) (born 21 May 1950) is a Jewish-American historian and the current Henry Putnam University Professor at Princeton University. He is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize.
Grafton was educated at Phillips Academy and the University of Chicago, where he took his A.B. and Ph.D. in rapid succession. He studied for one year at the University College, London under the celebrated ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano, and retains links with the Warburg Institute, University of London.
After a brief period teaching at Cornell's Department of History, he was appointed to a position at Princeton University in 1975, where he has subsequently remained. Since January 2007, he has been a co-editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Anthony Grafton is noted for his studies of the classical tradition from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, and in the history of historical scholarship. His many books include a profound study of the scholarship and chronology of the foremost classical scholar of the late Renaissance, Joseph Scaliger (2 vols, 1983-1993), a revisionist account (with Lisa Jardine) of the significance of Renaissance education (From Humanism to the Humanities, 1986), and, more recently, studies of Girolamo Cardano as an astrologer (1999) and Leon Battista Alberti (2000).
The best introduction to his preoccupation with the relations between scholarship and science in the early modern period is perhaps () Defenders of the Text (1991). In some ways his most original and accessible book is The Footnote: A curious history (1997; published in German as Die Tragischen Ursprünge der deutschen Fußnote), a case-study in what might be called the history of history, from below.
He also writes on a wide variety of topics for The New Republic, The American Scholar and The New York Review of Books. He owns a bookwheel which he keeps at hand in his office.
Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, Oxford-Warburg Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983-1993).
with Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities. Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986).
Forgers and Critics. Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in the Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Cardano's Cosmos : The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
with Megan Hale Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Codex in Crisis (New York: The Crumpled Press, 2008). Video: Anthony Grafton: Codex in Crisis, Authors@Google, February 12, 2009
Worlds Made by Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Review by Véronique Krings, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009.09.32
