{quotable thursdays}

"...Casaubon and Aldo shared an understanding that humanists, like scientists, rarely create themselves. We learn first as students and then as practitioners of disciplines, members of communities, users of libraries, habitués of archives, apprentices, and friends – as lurkers in particular intellectual, social, and institutional corners from which we look at the wide world. We see only one corner of the past or of the artistic or literary tradition, but we see it vividly, in color and perspective, because we know our set of sources so well and can study them in the particular ways into which we have been initiated by teachers and by the keepers of libraries and archives."

-Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words

Such brilliant words from a brilliant man.

{via zsazsa bellagio}

{ahh how I love libraries!}

{old books}

{rather dapper intellectual!}

{Isotta Nogarola, one of the first female humanists, depicted in her study}

{fifteenth-century humanists discussing literary refinement at the court of Ferrara. From Decembrio's  De politia litteraria }

xo, 

L