Customer Reviews

New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery

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Not the most stunning or innovative of Professor Grafton's works, <New Worlds, Ancient Texts> makes a sweeping review from the expectations held by the world of humanists received from Greek, Latin, and Arabic forerunners to the explosion and expansion of these expectations due to America's discovery. Grafton is a smooth and engaging writer, who can bind the vast realms of his study into fine sentences and clear argumentation.

The text consists of five chapters, intermittent miniature biographies of more interesting or less frequently known players, and luxurious black and white reproductions of images and manuscripts of the age. The text runs its course and neither references the small biographies nor acknowledges the handsome illustrations. It is very possible that one will skip over these images as accessory to follow the sweep of the author's narrative, only to revisit them later. Sweeps and anecdotes describe the nature of the investigation rather than patient analysis of sites and sights. This book seems to share only the prettiest berries plucked from Grafton's years as a tender of the tree.

This book more than adequately accounts for the changes in European thought on account of the discovery not just of new lands, but of new worlds, new diseases, drugs, and, as important, the discovery of the limitations of many ancient texts. Again, Grafton is beguiling, informative and masterful at his craft. <New Worlds, Ancient Texts> will be equally welcome reading for those who enjoy the period and those who wish to find a compelling way to enter it.

'New Worlds, Ancient Texts' was the companion to a 1992 exhibition of the same name at the New York Public Library. What is amazing is how well this book still stands on its own years later and in absentia from that exhibition.

Grafton (with help from Nancy Siraisi) shows how the ancient authors--on which 16th/17th c. Europeans relied so heavily to explain the known (and unknown) world--utterly failed to provide an adequate roadmap to the cosmos in the face of the discovery and exploration of the Americas. "Between 1550 and 1650," writes Grafton, "Western thinkers ceased to believe that they could find all important truths in ancient books."

As a result, Europeans were forced to confront the paucity of much of the classical knowledge on which they had relied for so long, and begin to develop their own mechanisms, theories, and models for understanding the world. This suggests the beginning of 'modern' knowledge; early-modern Europeans finally began to think for themselves, even if they still operated under the "shades of old images."

Grafton offers some fascinating examples of just how far the Europeans were willing to stretch the authority of the ancients to try accommodate new knowledge. In almost every case, the ancients were stretched so far they snapped.

In Grafton's capable hands, this short (and nicely illustrated) work is one of the best books available for understanding the impact of the discovery of the new world on the West's classical intellectual heritage.

Grafton's New Worlds, Ancient Texts is surprisingly accessible for a book on a quintessentially cultural subject: the impact of the fifteenth-century discovery of America on the classics and their position in European scholarship. It does not require more than superficial knowledge of ancient authors. It is clearly and economically written. It has useful captions on less well-known texts. And it is beautifully illustrated.

Grafton explains that a scholastic culture centring on a few authors, especially Greco-Roman ancients, and on the Bible was already under challenge, in the early sixteenth century, by the `humanists', writers who were rediscovering the classics in fresh translations or based on hitherto unavailable copies rescued from Constantinople. The discovery of the new world added fresh and dramatic impetus to this questioning of established authority. For example Aristotle, in his Meteorology, had written that no one could survive in the tropical zone, which was too hot. When the first Europeans crossed the equator, this began to look ridiculous. But the discoveries' impact was much broader, including that of tobacco, for example, challenging the main botanical and medical treatises, and spawning a pamphlet war as to whether it was the devil's tool. New Worlds, Ancient Texts examines a whole variety of such controversies, ranging from mapping, anthropology, medicine, and astronomy to philosophy. At the same time, it argues that the classics had a longer lease of life than is sometimes presumed, and retained relevance until well into the Enlightenment and beyond. This is an exciting work with lessons on travel, writing, and books which it is well worth reading both for its historical value and its implications about the nature of knowledge in general.

I posted a review here on October 10. I want to make a small correction, in case I confused anyone. The book I recommended looking at, if you can find a copy, is "Off the Beaten TRACK in the Classics," not "Off the Beaten PATH...." The author is C. Kaeppel, and it was published in Melbourne, Australia, in 1936.

Grafton has written a learned but deceiving book. His thesis that 'the power of (European) tradition' was able to subsume the initial 'shock of the discovery,' forgets too easily that America was not 'discovered' but unintentionally found and very soon invaded. The vision that Europeans had of the 'new' lands, animals and people 'discovered,' was not merely theoretical (i.e. a detached, scientific, almost aesthetic) contemplation of something unforeseen or unfamiliar, but a practical (i.e. political, transforming, dominating and even genocidal) relation to that otherness. No wonder the 'power' (not only of 'tradition') prevailed over that 'shocking' otherness.