Anthony Grafton, the Henry Putnam University Professor of History, transferred to emeritus status July 1, 2025, after fifty years on the faculty. One of the greatest historians of his generation, he has been among the University’s most extraordinary faculty members—a dynamic and inspiring teacher, a brilliant and generous colleague, and a tireless champion of the humanities, both on and off campus.

Born and raised in the New York City area, and educated at the University of Chicago, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. (and to which he remains devoted), Anthony has dedicated his career to the study of humanism and classical scholarship. Deeply influenced by mentors such as the renowned historians Hanna Holborn Gray and Arnaldo Momigliano, he chose as his dissertation subject the great sixteenth-century Huguenot scholar Joseph Scaliger. Through painstaking and difficult work, relying on his profound command of Greek and Latin, Anthony not only demonstrated Scaliger’s crucial contributions to the fields of philology and chronology, but cast him as a central character in a late Renaissance world of scholarship that remained far more vital and creative than historians had previously recognized. Published in two volumes by Clarendon Press in 1983 and 1994, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship remains foundational. It was also gracefully and engagingly written, revealing Anthony’s unmatched talent for transmitting his own excitement about the history of classical scholarship to his readers and students.

The Scaliger volumes serve as the base for what has become an imposing mountain of scholarship: more than three dozen books, close to 250 scholarly articles, several important museum exhibitions, and a steady stream of reviews and journalism. It is work that breathes with sympathy for its subjects and allows readers to see the world through their eyes. And in keeping with Anthony’s vision of scholarship as a collaborative enterprise, much of it has itself been collaborative in nature. Among his many co-authored books and articles is the pathbreaking 1990 Past and Present article “Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” co-written with British historian Lisa Jardine, which illuminated the complex story of Renaissance reading strategies by analyzing the marginal notes made by this English Renaissance humanist. 

As with that article, Anthony’s work has been especially illuminating about the various concrete practices that shaped humanistic learning in the Renaissance and since: notetaking (including, especially, in the margins of books—no scholar has done more to elevate humble “marginalia”), textual comparison, the drafting of manuscripts—even footnoting. Indeed, this last practice became the subject of one of Anthony’s most celebrated and engaging books: The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997). Meanwhile, in his important Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton University Press, 1990), Anthony brilliantly showed how Renaissance practices of textual criticism were both indebted to practices of textual forgery—and helped promote forgeries in their turn.

More broadly, this meticulous attention to the gritty practicalities of scholarship has helped Anthony show how deeply the Renaissance variety differed from our own, and the integral place within it of beliefs and practices too easily dismissed as irrational, occult, esoteric, or even fraudulent. His influential What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2007), on the birth of modern history writing in the early modern period, demonstrated the surprising interplay between rigorous critical practice and the acceptance of falsehoods. His wonderful Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Harvard University Press, 1999) explored how a practitioner of this ancient art made a successful career in early modern Italy. The same concerns animate Anthony’s most recent book, Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Harvard, 2023). “The magus,” he writes eloquently in it, “is a less respectable figure than the artist or the scientist…but he belongs in a dark corner of the same rich tapestry.”

Anthony’s teaching, and his devotion to his students, are legendary. He has directed nearly forty dissertations, and close to eighty senior theses. Some years he has directed as many as six senior theses, and even while he was on leave in 2013-14, he directed three. His teaching even inspired a well-received novel by two of his students: the 2004 The Rule of Four, which includes a character based on Anthony. He loves collaborative teaching as much as collaborative scholarship and continued to precept for colleagues’ lecture courses long after most Princeton faculty had abandoned the practice. Along with his former student Ann Blair, now at Harvard, he has directed the Harvard-Princeton Graduate Conference in Early Modern History, now in its seventeenth year, that has fostered key connections among rising scholars in this field. At a conference held in his honor in May 2015, generations of Anthony’s students praised him for his achievements and mentorship, while Anthony’s own passionate account of his commitment to the history and practice of scholarship brought many in the audience to tears. Students have enjoyed the warm hospitality of Anthony and his late wife, Louise, in their Princeton home, where a copy of a Renaissance “book wheel,” which allowed scholars to keep many books open within easy reach, is on prominent display.

Anthony’s service to Princeton has been constant and unstinting. In addition to directing the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies and chairing the Humanities Council, he has served on endless committees, mentored countless junior colleagues, and given particularly precious assistance to the Program in European Cultural Studies and the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.

The dozens of well-deserved honors that Anthony has received are far too numerous to list in full. Among the most prominent are honorary degrees from Oxford and Leiden, election to the German Order Pour le Mérite, memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy, the Balzan Prize for History of the Humanities, the Andrew Mellon Foundation Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, and the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship. He has given distinguished lecture series, held visiting professorships, and served on advisory boards across the world. In 2011, he served as president of the American Historical Association, the highest honor for an American historian.

With his retirement, Anthony plans to move to New York City, but his colleagues hope he will remain a frequent visitor to Princeton. The University, and the discipline of history, are and will forever remain deeply in his debt.

Written by members of the Department of History faculty.