Was Mabillon a Humanist?

• In Event: Interpreting the Antique 1500–1675 IV: The Humanists and the Antique

Abstract

Silvia Rizzo, Ingo Herklotz and others have taught us that the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries knew a a great deal about manuscripts, their materials and their scripts. In this paper I examine the De re diplomatica (1681) of Jean Mabillon, a brilliant treatise traditionally taken as marking the origins of modern diplomatics and palaeography. My aim is to work out how far Mabillon was indebted to the scholarship of the humanists when he set out to transform manuscript studies into an exact discipline.

Author

• Anthony Grafton, Princeton University