Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2021 -

A new book by Grafton (Princeton) is always a cause for celebration. His breathtaking range of knowledge of Latin and vernacular Renaissance texts, and of modern commentaries on them, has enabled him over 40 years to illuminate countless byways of early modern European culture. Except for one chapter on the role of correctors in (and outside) Renaissance printing shops, Inky Fingers is not about printing; it is about authorship, especially how books are made of other books. Grafton begins with the way students were advised to keep choice passages from their reading in notebooks--adversaria or more carefully arranged commonplace books. Many scholars added to these notebooks throughout their lives and some, like the "Bee-Hive" of Francis Daniel Pastorius of Germantown, PA, reached stupendous length; such compendia were storehouses from which further books were made. Grafton discusses this in detail and also explores early modern comparative religion's efforts to trace Christian practices back to Judaism and even ancient paganism and tease out the theological sources Baruch Spinoza mined to construct his radical Tractatus Theologic-Politicus; Jean Mabillion's De Re Diplomatica (1681), the founding work of modern paleography; and learned scholars taken in by fakes, among them the most daring forger of the age, Annius of Viterbo, poisoned by Cesare Borgia. All are fascinating.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Spira (an independent art historian and curator) has written an engaging and accessible treatment of the cultural history of selfhood. Drawing from his varied experiences and knowledge in the field of art history, Spira focuses on the history of European art from the High Middle Ages through the modern era, looking at the emergence and refinement of what he calls "self-sense." This reviewer has been fascinated by this subject since reading Philippe Aries, Roger Chartier, and Stephen Greenblatt for the first time. Spira, however, has accomplished something notable: he has written a book that is learned but not exclusively so. Though he writes with a keen awareness of the discourses on private life from a variety of disciplines-- philosophy, psychology, literary studies, art history--he weaves them together into one of the most accessible learned accounts of European personal identity that this reviewer has ever read. Marked by beautiful prose and scholarly acumen, this book has the ability to fundamentally transform one's appreciation of cultural history and its relationship to everyday experience.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.