Renaissance Romans and
Egyptian Obelisks
Archaeology, Engineering, and Ritual
in an Early Modern City
Anthony Grafton
Henry Putnam University Professor
of History
Princeton University
Rome is the obelisk capital of the world.
Renowned Princeton historian Anthony Grafton considers
how the massive obelisks of ancient Rome were brought
to life there by the inscriptions, narratives, and poems
wrapped around them.
Before the lecture, Penn Museum Director
Dr. Richard M. Leventhal will lead a special tour of
some of the University Museum's most fascinating inscriptions.
 Anthony
Grafton has been called an "alchemist of erudition,"
a prolific, engaging intellectual historian whose ability
to bring the past alive has earned him the respect of
his peers and public alike. His scholarly specialty
is the study of scholars who didn't specialize: the
great polymaths, Renaissance virtuosos, and early-modern
encyclopedists. He also writes regularly for The
New York Review of Books, The American Scholar,
The New Republic, and other publications.
In his wide-ranging body of work, Prof.
Grafton recreates lost worlds of knowledge, uncovering
what one reviewer called the "secret passions lurking
in some of the most arid-sounding studies the mind can
imagine." His many books include a profound study
of the scholarship and chronology of Joseph Scaliger,
the foremost classical scholar of the late Renaissance,
and From Humanism to the Humanities, a revisionist
account (with Lisa Jardine) of the significance of Renaissance
education. In what some consider his most original and
accessible book, The Footnote: A Curious History,
one comes to fully appreciate why, as he observes, footnotes
have the same effect on a scholar as clover on a pig.
His many honors include Europe's Balzan
Prize in 2002 for History of the Humanities, the
Mellon
Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2004,
and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His current book projects
include a study of the original Dr. Faustus (Penguin).
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