“Between 1550 and 1650,” Anthony Grafton begins, “Western thinkers ceased to believe that they could find all important truths in books.” After the mid-seventeenth century, in John Donne’s famous lament, all coherence left the world. That coherence had relied on the acceptance of a canon of texts—the Bible, the works of the church fathers, and a limited but equally venerated body of works by the ancients. The limits of all that could be known, it was accepted, had been set by that canon. Knowledge could be acquired only by patient exegesis of and commentary on these texts. And when the texts came into conflict with external reality, as they frequently did, then it was, at least in the first instance, reality that had to give.
The change from this worldview to the one with which we are familiar today—one in which the external world is our ultimate, sometimes our sole, point of reference—was a slow and painful one. The discovery of America played a crucial, and still improperly understood, role in it. For, as Erasmus observed as early as 1517, if the ancient geographers were wrong in assuming that there were only three continents, might they not have been wrong in other respects, too? Once the hitherto unquestionable authority of one part of the canon had collapsed, might not all the other parts be suspect also?
This is the subject of Grafton’s book. It was written around an exhibition held at the New York Public Library, and its argument was dictated by the library’s collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books. Despite the limitations this format necessarily imposes, this book offers a comprehensive and highly readable account of the role of other worlds in the European encounter with the “new.” The book also, as Grafton claims, attempts to raise the level of debate in an area—the “relations between the West and the Rest”—in which the discussion has, in large part, been tendentious, self-serving, and crushingly banal. (Included here is a telling critique of the epigones of Edward Said.)
Grafton is certainly the most interesting Renaissance scholar writing today. He is hugely learned and wide-ranging in his interests. He also writes with a flair and imagination few other scholars can match. If anyone can show what it might have been like to inhabit a world that looked on books “as the most powerful sources of knowledge. … like bombs, armed, powerful and ready at any moment to explode,” it is he. Those who wish to understand the impact of the discovery of America on the science and philosophy of early modem Europe should begin here.
