HISTORY : Loose Canons

In his eloquent disquisition, “New Worlds, Ancient Texts,” Anthony Grafton, the Andrew Mellon professor of history at Princeton University, demonstrates his mastery of the world of the Renaissance text and his skills as a historian of scholarship, scholarly processes and intellectual debates. As in his previous four books, Grafton treats a big subject (authoritative texts or the canon) with a “small compass” (the impact of the discovery of the New World). And once again, he persuasively demonstrates the limits of the conventional historical debate, concluding that the world of the European canon was not as solid nor the effect of New World-based ideas as devastating as the debaters would have it.

Grafton argues that all thought is historically conditioned, that a canon (body of “indispensable” texts) is only partially dominant in any time period, and that innovation or change in cosmologies is relative. Though we are bound tightly by our printed lore, we are also in the process of becoming unbound--freed by new data flowing in from non-print sources. No canon is monolithic; each is rife with contradiction, inconsistency and falsity; each vulnerable to challenge from new sources of data, innovative categories and altered perspectives.

This particular application of Grafton’s dialectical method of textual analysis began when the guardians of the New York Public Library invited him to explore the 16th- and 17th-Century materials, organize an exhibition and write a book tracing the transforming effects of the voyages of discovery on European scholarship, learning and culture, 1450-1700. In the course of five chapters, interspersed with illustrations and literary excerpts, he demonstrates the struggle between “truth” and inconvenient facts, showing that the old is rarely vanquished by the new, that oftentimes the old collapses from the weight of its own internal contradictions, and that the two processes produce new canons, themselves subject to critical challenge from within and without.

He begins directly and simply: “Between 1550 and 1650 Western thinkers ceased to believe that they could find all important truths in ancient books.” Jose de Acosta, for example, when crossing the Equator, came upon cold weather--an experience his reading of Aristotle’s “Meteorology” had not prepared him for. “What could I do then but laugh?” he writes. The reports and commentaries of De Acosta and others, mainly written in the vernacular rather than the Latin of the academies, described a world so much more varied and more complex than those described in the authoritative texts, that the conceptual universe of learned Europeans began to shake and totter.

But it did not collapse, because defenders as well as critics of the European canon still had to use it to frame the data from the New World. Willy-nilly bound by the texts that had taught them their scholarly methods, they did not “see the New World ‘as it really was.’ ”

Grafton sets the stage for his analysis with the well-titled opening chapter: “A Bound World: The Scholar’s Cosmos.” Prior to the arrival of data from the New World, university scholars, fortified by authoritative texts and the learned commentaries attempting to resolve inconsistencies between the texts, were already engaged in a fierce struggle to defend the scholastic system against a humanist offensive. As the voyages of discovery began, two canons had emerged, both enfiladed by firing within. By 1520, Grafton concludes, “the world of the book was not coherent but chaotic, not solid but riven.”

The navigators and conquerors also came from a culture of the book; they relied on both the wisdom of the ancients and the practical skills and technical data provided by the humanists. The descriptions that resulted from the reports of their voyages melded old and new, producing new inconsistencies. Grafton shows that Columbus and Vespucci “peered through tightly woven filters of expectation and assumption from the past.” Thus, what they wrote about their “observations” was shaped by what they had previously read about what they were going to see. But whereas Columbus used his texts to make the new familiar, Vespucci framed his account as something new.

The flood of reports eliminated what scholarly coherence still existed. One of the main efforts to systematize and assimilate the new knowledge, Sebastian Munster’s “Cosmographia,” coupled the most current data with the most popular errors, thus reproducing “the kaleidoscopic variety of facts and images that danced tauntingly around a learned Europe.” Though all the thinkers understood the fallibility of ancient science, and some searched for a new paradigm, none found a completely new system.

Finally, the seemingly most radical text (Bacon’s “Instauratio Magna”), the most far-reaching intellectual debates (on the origins of the New World’s peoples), and the newest institutions (museums, learned societies) all relied, more than the authors and founders admitted, on ancient texts. Though the authority of the ancients lay in ruins, ancient authorities still provided the assumptions and tools necessary for thinkers to conceptualize. Late into the 17th Century, philosophers used classical texts “to make the New World, suitably transformed, part of a nascent, modern canon of texts and ideas--one as riven with fruitful contradictions as the older canon it replaced.”

HISTORY

NEW WORLDS, ANCIENT TEXTS: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, by Anthony Grafton (Harvard University Press)

Nominees

THE MOST SOUTHERN PLACE ON EARTH: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity, by James C. Cobb (Oxford University Press)

TRAGIC MOUNTAINS: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992, by Jane Hamilton-Merritt (Indiana University Press)

RISING IN THE WEST: The True Story of an ‘Okie’ Family From the Great Depression Through the Reagan Years, by Dan Morgan (Alfred A. Knopf)

THE IMMOBILE EMPIRE: The First Great Collision of East and West / The Astonishing History of Britain’s Grand Ill-Fated Expedition to Open China to Western Trade, 1792-1794, by Alain Peyrefitte (Alfred A. Knopf)