The Making of the Humanities
When we think of the humanities in early modern times we are usually 
thinking about school and academy syllabi that were built up on the specific 
tradition of European Latinitas. This was the central concern of the widely. 
discussed 1986 book by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to 
the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in 15^(th) and 16^(th) Century Europe. 
Their central argument, that the humanities started with scholars like Peter Ramus, 
who unhinged humanist teaching from its moral foundations, is subsumed beneath 
an altogether different view of the beginning of the humanities in this collective 
volume, The Making of the Humanities. Writing about early modern humanities 
in this book is synonymous with writing about a bunch of disciplines that came 
into being much later. The authors treat the humanities as traditions of specific 
knowledge that are connected to politics and scholarly practices, of which teaching is 
not the pivotal one. Eighteen case studies describe correcting, streaming, gathering, 
transferring knowledge in fields preceding those that came to be called the 
humanities in the nineteenth century. Contributors take a comparative view 
in order to build contexts with other fields and discuss different methods and formats. Protagonists include the polymath Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the 
Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (ca. 1601-80), and the Dutch philosopher Baruch 
Spinoza (1632-77). The strength of this book lies in the way it connects these 
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.