The Making of the Humanities

Anja-Silvia Goeing, in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Fall 2012): 'The strength of this book lies in the way it connects = well-known profiles to lesser-known figures, and in its discussion of those fields, including the visual arts, linguistics, and history, that had scarcely been defined among the artes liberales in the humanism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As this book shows, the significance of these disciplines for the academy grew immensely in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The chapters examine the history of disciplines that today are regarded as separate and distinct. = The purpose of this book is to answer two questions: first, the question of what - what kind of organizing principles did academic knowledge deploy in different early modern settings?; and second, the question of how - how did academic knowledge in Europe come to be what it is in modern times? The authors' focus on the non-sciences is intended to fill a lack that the editors see when compared to the vast and existing literature written about the history of the sciences. The book is therefore most valuable to academics studying the history of European academic knowledge.'