The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag

by Peter Burke

Overview

From Leonardo Da Vinci to Oliver Sacks: the first history of the western polymath, from the Renaissance to the present 

"An absorbing group portrait and intellectual history."—Kirkus Reviews

"An admirable mixture of industry and erudition."—Robert Wilson, Wall Street Journal

From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can be unkind to scholars with such encyclopedic interests. All too often these individuals are remembered for just one part of their valuable achievements.  

In this engaging, erudite account, renowned cultural historian Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view. Identifying 500 western polymaths, Burke explores their wide-ranging successes and shows how their rise matched a rapid growth of knowledge in the age of the invention of printing, the discovery of the New World and the Scientific Revolution. It is only more recently that the further acceleration of knowledge has led to increased specialization and to an environment that is less supportive of wide-ranging scholars and scientists.

Spanning the Renaissance to the present day, Burke changes our understanding of this remarkable intellectual species.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300250022
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	09/08/2020
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	88,749
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Peter Burke is emeritus professor of cultural history at Cambridge University. He is the author of many books including A Social History of Knowledge, Eyewitnessing, and What Is Cultural History? His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Table of Contents

List of Plates viii

Preface and Acknowledgements x

Introduction: What is a Polymath? 1

1 East and West 10

2 The Age of the 'Renaissance Man', 1400-1600 26

3 The Age of 'Monsters of Erudition', 1600-1700 47

4 The Age of the 'Man of Letters', 1700-1850 83

5 The Age of Territoriality, 1850-2000 127

6 A Group Portrait 170

7 Habitats 191

8 The Age of Interdisciplinarity 213

Coda: Towards a Third Crisis 240

Appendix: 500 Western Polymaths 247

Notes 278

Further Reading 316

Index 318

Editorial Reviews

"An absorbing group portrait and intellectual history."—Kirkus Reviews

“An absorbing and polymathic account of an important intellectual species. This is a significant and timely book, because in illustrating why our culture needs polymaths as well as specialists it prompts us to think afresh about the aims of education and what we need to better inform our public conversation.”—A. C. Grayling

“As well as illuminating general patterns, Burke’s polymaths fizz with their own energy, obsessiveness, and life.”—Neil Kenny,author of The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany

"The author and his subjects undoubtedly inhabit a shared world, which Burke explains to the rest of us with remarkable insight and understanding, providing both historical depth and remarkable cross-disciplinary breadth.”— Paul Duguid, co-author of The Social Life of Information

“In this kaleidoscopic account, Peter Burke unfolds the amazing stories of “monsters of erudition,” tracing the fate of the universal thinker in a world flooding with information.”— Daniel Rosenberg, co-author of Cartographies of Time

From the Publisher

2020-07-14
In this survey of polymaths, Burke offers “an approach to the social and cultural history of knowledge.”

The author, an emeritus professor of cultural history at Cambridge, delivers a collective biography of polymaths active primarily from the 15th to the 21st centuries—though Burke does occasionally journey further back, as in the cases of Hypatia of Alexandria, Hui Shi, Boethius, Hildegard of Bingen, and Ibn Khaldun. In concise and revealing vignettes, the author profiles dozens of “monsters of erudition,” proceeding chronologically in order to provide the context of intellectual and social trends that either fertilized or quashed the polymathic impulse. At times, Burke gets too absorbed in complete coverage of individuals and groups, at the expense of insight into the connections they made. Many of these intellectual giants sought to break down the barriers of communication between a growing group of specialists; they were “individuals and small groups concerned with the big picture as well as with detail and often engaged in the transfer or ‘translation’ of ideas and practices from one discipline to another.” Mostly, however, Burke provides well-rounded pictures of the polymaths, and his precisely observed anecdotes aptly range across disciplines, approaches, and contributions, covering motivations such as curiosity and the ordering and unification of knowledge as well as the reconciliation of ideas. By the late 17th and early 18th centuries, polymaths aroused suspicions of triviality, superficiality, and a confused mass of useless knowledge, and specialization became the dominant mode of inquiry. In the current digital age, which is characterized by “hyper-specialization,” polymaths are not nearly as relevant as they have been in the past, but, the author writes, “an elegy for the species is still premature.” In an appendix, Burke chronologically lists 500 significant Western polymaths along with their birth and death dates, ethnicity, and primary disciplines.

An absorbing group portrait and intellectual history.

Kirkus Reviews

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