100 books like Scribes and Scholars

Despite draft-stage admonitions from his great friend, the Jesuit priest Ronald Knox, the amount of sex Waugh layers into Brideshead Revisited is surprising for 1945: functionally heterosexual couplings, more given over to class imperatives of property, inheritance and trophy wives, and the tentatively homosexual (depending on interpretation), as located in the awakenings of young adulthood, as sluiced by wine, aesthetic beauty, cigars and Venice in Summer.

But it’s Venice and its architecture that’s the actual location of the full sensual awakening, triggering the protagonist’s eventual journey to Catholicism as he passes time among the Venetian stone of churches… and a fountain: “This was my conversion to the baroque...I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring.” Eroticized Ruskinalia, finally stepping beyond the Anglo-Catholicism of the Oxford Movement.

Academic institutions are competitive environments governed not only by the zest to enrich and transmit knowledge, but also by politics, vanity, and caprices. In many respects, they resemble life at a royal court as described by the seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit philosopher Baltasar Gracián. His Pocket Oracle is chock-full of advice, in the form of maximally compact yet hauntingly beautifully written maxims, on how to penetrate through the appearance of things. Imbued in the art of discernment of St. Ignatius of Loyola, he repeatedly singles out the essential qualities that make possible successful choices in academic life as well, such as taste, judgment, and an eye for talent. One of his aphorisms (no. 4) is particularly dear to me: scholarship and courage make immortal, because that is what they themselves are.

Scholarship, regardless of the particular field, is always a creative process. Craft and method, the fruits of a rigorous education and hard work, are essential prerequisites, but genuine breakthroughs often seem to result from some mysterious incubation: a wild dance of ideas that emerge from the subconscious, stirred up by the keen will to understand something. Only a few of them eventually make it, by way of sensual representations, to the surface of consciousness, where they are formed and articulated by logic and language. In this book, the great French mathematician Jacques Hadamard captivatingly describes his investigation into the psychological underpinnings of creativity. He stresses the role of images and emotions in thought processes. I have always liked his conclusion that every significant invention requires at least some poetic feel.

Many ideas and concepts still common in the more traditional branches of Humanities belong to the intellectual heritage of the nineteenth century. This is also the time when my own field, Semitic Philology, emerged as a professionalized discipline. Fritz Ringer, himself a German-born emigree to the US, provides a rigorous analysis of the social background and self-understanding of German academic elites during that formative period until the collapse of their natural habitat in the catastrophe of the Second World War. His work is a demanding yet rewarding read because it brings to the fore the institutional underpinnings of scholarship. It shows how great an impact societal context has on scholarly achievements, and thus contributes to a better, historically sensitive, understanding of the specific environment in which academic life generally takes place.

As someone who loves history, particularly Celtic history, this one hit me in a really special place in my heart. This little-known history of the Celtic Saints, and particularly Saint Patrick really opened my eyes. It details how Celtic monks quietly saved the written word while barbarians and Vikings burnt Roman literature—which would have made all western thought—even the bible on the threat of extinction. It dazzled me to be given a much bigger perspective on the infamous Book of Kells, and even how schools throughout the western world originated because of these men that hid behind the chaos of the times. All this history by itself was amazing to learn, but even more, the author wrote with wit and charm that made it a fun read.

A lively account of the ways in which the philosophical and medical ideas of the Greeks were transmitted to Rome, the Arab world, and medieval Italy. What Plato, Aristotle and Galen had said was often changed and even lost on the way, and only partially recovered in Renaissance Italy. A vivid reminder of the influence of the Greeks over many centuries.

Patrick Wormald’s early death was a tragedy for early medieval studies as a whole.

Thankfully his former student, Stephen Baxter – an exceptional scholar in his own right – had the energy to carry some of his mentor’s projects over the line, including this collection of some of Wormald’s best essays, articles, and book chapters relating to Bede and his world.

Patrick was also my tutor for several undergraduate courses at Oxford as well as being the supervisor for my Master's Thesis and I too owe him a great debt. This edited collection – with the advantage of updated references and comments – showcases the searing brilliance which made Wormald such a prized commentator on everything connected to the early Middle Ages.

Coupled with Campbell's Essays in Anglo-Saxon History, readers will quickly gain nuanced perspectives on elements and themes crucial in comprehending the conversion of the early English.

This pioneering book challenges the notion that literacy in the early Middle Ages was confined to a small clerical elite and a very thin layer of lay aristocrats. By looking at a wide range of documents that survive from the eighth and the ninth centuries, Rosamond McKitterick demonstrates that literacy in the Carolingian period was widespread, not only among clerics and governmental agents but also among the lay population.

Indeed, as McKitterick points out, the written word played a central role in both the legal system and the royal administration, but it also had an important cultural and social role that affected all strata of society.

Foucault’s groundbreaking work from the 1960s looks at how systems of order and classification came into being during the age of rationalism with Descartes, culminating in the 18th-century Enlightenment’s project of subjecting every field of knowledge to its own self-enclosed order. It remains of the great works of theoretical synthesis, patiently dissecting the structures of knowledge, of order and priority, that western learning continues to take for granted. At half a century’s distance, Foucault is the one French thinker whose legacy remains intact for his lucidity, polemical edge, and refusal of esoteric linguistic games.

Barzun, who lived to be 104, was in his lifetime possibly the most erudite human being on the planet. 

And this book, published when he was much younger (as a spry 93-year-old) is an almost perfect history of the modern age: a superb, readable sort-of survey that is not surveyish but rather earnestly engaged with themes that were important in the 16th-century beginnings of our modern civilization and are important still. 

Barzun doesn’t seem to be a gloomy naysayer, and he admires and appreciates the achievements of Western civilization; but as his title suggests, he came to believe that the culture is exhausted and unraveling. An informative and provocative read!