Friends of PUL Small Talk: "Joseph Scaliger, Forger: The Secret Life of the Most Learned Man in Europe’s Great Age of Learning" with Tony Grafton
Tony Grafton has studied master scholar Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) for two decades of his life. In April 2024, Grafton began to realize that Scaliger was also a forger.
He faked evidence to prove that his father, and he after him, were descended from the della Scala, Italian princes who had ruled Verona in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This genealogy was a complete fantasy that Joseph’s father—who was really the son of a very skillful illuminator and cartographer—bequeathed to him. Yet Joseph defended it as passionately as any of his other scholarly theories—so passionately that he went off the rails that he had followed throughout his life.
It is strange and ironic that Scaliger turned to forgery. In an intellectual world dominated by bearded men who were fantastically erudite and sharply critical—he was the most learned and critical, as well as the best-bearded, of them all. He mastered many languages, which he used to revolutionize the study of world history. His discoveries won him a unique position at the University of Leiden, where he received a very high salary and was not required to teach. Above all, he became Europe’s greatest expert on forgeries. Greek and Roman, Jewish and Christian fakes that had fooled everyone fell to his criticism.
Yet Scaliger deliberately changed and invented evidence to support his father’s mythical account of their genealogy. In this talk, Grafton will briefly describe Scaliger’s life and work and then discuss his forgeries, presenting evidence that ranges from a wonderful book in Princeton’s Special Collections to his own writings. Why did this brilliant gamekeeper turn, at the end of his life, into a poacher, courting humiliation? And how did his version of his family’s past win out in the long run?
(Image: Portrait of Josephus Justus Scaliger, by Jan Cornelisz. van 't Woudt or Woudanus, 1608.)
Current Friends of PUL members are invited to attend in person. Registration is required.
The presentation will also be available by Zoom for non-members.
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- Date:
- Wednesday, December 4, 2024
- Time:
- 4:00pm - 5:00pm
- Location:
- The Nassau Club, 6 Mercer Street, Princeton, NJ 08540
- Audience:
- Friends of Princeton University Library Student Friends of Princeton University Library
- Categories:
- Events Friends of the Princeton University Library Event
Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History
Professor Grafton’s current project is a large-scale study of the science of chronology in 16th- and 17th-century Europe: how scholars attempted to assign dates to past events, reconstruct ancient calendars, and reconcile the Bible with competing accounts of the past. He hopes to reconstruct the complex and dramatic process by which the biblical regime of historical time collapsed, concentrating on the first half of the 17th century.
Professor Grafton’s special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. He joined the Princeton History Department in 1975 after earning his A.B. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) in history from the University of Chicago and spending a year at University College London, where he studied with Arnaldo Momigliano. Professor Grafton likes to see the past through the eyes of influential and original writers, and has accordingly written intellectual biographies of a 15th-century Italian humanist, architect, and town planner, Leon Battista Alberti; a 16th-century Italian astrologer and medical man, Girolamo Cardano; and a 16th-century French classicist and historian, Joseph Scaliger. He also studies the long-term history of scholarly practices, such as forgery and the citation of sources, and has worked on many other topics in cultural and intellectual history. Professor Grafton is the author of ten books and the coauthor, editor, coeditor, or translator of nine others. Two collections of essays, Defenders of the Text (1991) and Bring Out Your Dead (2001), cover most of the topics and themes that appeal to him. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1993), the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities (2002), and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2003), and is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the British Academy. In 2011 he served as President of the American Historical Association. At Princeton he is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History.
This event is part of the Friends of the Princeton University Library Small Talks Series.
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