Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices

Anthony Grafton teaches European history at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of classical scholarship, the history of science and the history of learning, from late antiquity to the twentieth century. Glenn W. Most is Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. He has published numerous books and articles on classics; the history and methodology of classical studies; the classical tradition and comparative literature; modern philosophy and literature; literary theory; the history of science; and the history of art.

• How to do things with texts: an introduction Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most; 1. Reliable books: Islamic law, canonization, and manuscripts in the Ottoman Empire (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) Guy Burak; 2. Obscurity Ineke Sluiter; 3. Allegoresis and etymology Glenn W. Most; 4. Classifying the Rigveda on the basis of ritual usage: the deity-of-the-formula system Paolo Visigalli; 5. Maryādām Ullanghya: The boundaries of interpretation in early modern India Christopher Minkowski; 6. Making sense of Suetonius in the twelfth century Robert A. Kaster; 7. From Philology to Philosophy: Zhu Xi as a reader-annotator Lianbin Dai; 8. Gods on clay: ancient Near Eastern scholarly practices and the history of religions Aaron Tugendhaft; 9. An unknown medieval Coptic Hebraism? On a momentous junction of Jewish and Coptic biblical studies Ronny Vollandt; 10. Picturing as practice: placing a square above a square in the central Middle Ages Megan McNamee; 11. Inimitable sources: canonical texts and rhetorical theory in the Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew traditions Filippomaria Pontani; 12. Excerpts versus fragments: deconstructions and reconstitutions of the Excerpta Constantiniana András Németh; 13. Johann Buxtorf makes a notebook Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg; 14. World bibliographies: libraries and the reorganization of knowledge in late Renaissance Europe Paola Molino.

'… this transcultural investigation is the fruit of comparative and collaborative scholarship at its best. It is, to use the editors' coinage, a 'symphilological' achievement that will leave its readers with a habit of stopping to think about the particularity of scholarly practices and its implications for the history of ideas. All the contributions are lucidly written with a cross-disciplinary audience in mind and beautifully documented with images, tables, and transcriptions of the evidence discussed … the choice to let the individual contributions speak for themselves, along with the work of comparison and juxtaposition germane to the textual practice of the essay collection, seems a forceful methodological statement for a project that places the case study at the heart of its epistemic undertaking.' Tania Demetriuo, Isis Review