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FROM ANDREW HUI (PhD Princeton 2009, Comparative Literature)

The Homeric bards were famed for their oimai—the paths of songs that took the audience to imaginary worlds, narrating the cycles of the heroes of old—their births, deaths and strivings in this wide green world of ours. In this generation, Tony Grafton, that most bardic of teachers, has taken all of us on many itineraries, through worlds ancient and modern, texts well-loved and forgotten. 

I wish to share one particular oimê, one that does not traverse the Mediterranean seas or the venerable libraries of Europe, but rather along the Northeast Corridor of the Mid-Atlantic States, through the bus, car, train, and taxi.

This is a recent memory—just last April (2014)—it was my first year teaching at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and I returned to the US for the American Comparative Literature Association conference at NYU. Tony was a fellow at the New York Public Library and preparing his Andrew W. Mellon Lectures to be delivered in a couple of weeks at the National Gallery. I just wanted to meet up with him and catch up on things.

It was a bright spring day, we met around noon. He took me a tour of the Cullman center and the library; we had pastrami sandwiches at a classic joint that catered for the mid-town office workers (we looked distinctly out-of-place in a phalanx of business suits), then carried coffee from a hipster café to Bryant Park, then a brisk walk to the Port Authority to meet up with Freddie Clark, who had just won a post-doc fellowship at Stanford. All three of us took the $16.50 Bolt bus one-way to Philadelphia.

Why? To see Ann Blair’s Rosenbach lectures, “Hidden Hands: Amanuenses and Authorship in Early Modern Europe.” On the way to the Penn campus we stopped for freshly baked cookies at a food-truck. After Ann’s splendid talk we went Thai food with Theo Dunkelgrün and Adam Beaver, then we all crammed into Adam’s SUV and he dropped us off at Princeton Junction, then a half-an hour wait in the still-bitter April cold for the NJ Transit, then back to Penn Station, and finally, around 1 a.m., a cab ride to Lower Manhattan, where my hotel was and where Tony has an pied-à-terre. He said that he had to wake up by 5 a.m. to finish a review for the LRB, couple of reference letters for colleagues and students, and the proofs for an edited volume. . . .

What I remember that day was—all of us know this already but it bears repeating—his unflagging energy, enthusiasm, generosity, the glint in his eyes when he glowed about his students, whether it was his first—Ann Blair, or most recent, Maddy McMahon.

It was truly an epic day—journey by feet, bus, SUV, train, cab, from noon to well after midnight—all in the conviviality of scholars. This was just one of the innumerable daily oimai for Tony, for it combined solitary reading and writing in the morning, a commingling of multiple generations of students and colleagues in the day, and more nocturnal lucubration, all done in the epic spirit of joyous learning.

When I give an academic talk the sight of Tony in the audience always brings a welcome feeling of reassurance. Improbably, this was true even when I was a fledgling graduate student. The first time was a conference at Stanford in 2001. It was one of my first academic presentations, and I had many reasons to be nervous, not least my desire to impress Tony, whom I had briefly met moments before. I was the second speaker on the program, following Ingrid Rowland who delivered a paper about cosmic sperm. As I spoke, I cast my gaze around the audience, as a public speaker should, but my attention was drawn magnetically to Tony. The source of this attractive force was not mysterious. It was Tony’s head. It occupied a considerable amount of the visual field, and not only because of the voluminous black beard. But it wasn’t the great head itself, so much as what it was doing: bobbing up and down in continuous and vigorous approval of my every word. What a brilliant paper I seemed to have written! In the years since, I’ve come to know that Tony’s distinctive, secular davening can register a broad range of reactions. Primarily it’s a sign of attentiveness, not necessarily assent or approval. But even knowing this, it still never fails to instill me with the same feeling of confidence. There is probably something primal in the body language of a nodding head that goes straight to my brainstem with the message, “right on, well said.” But, that message—real or imagined—affects me because it comes from Tony. And Tony has, of course, been enormously, unambiguously, gratuitously encouraging. After that first conference paper he agreed to serve on my dissertation committee and has been a crucial source of inspiration and intellectual and moral support ever since.

That conference was the first time I met Tony personally, but my first physical sighting of man and beard happened several years earlier. It was at the History of Science Society’s annual meeting in La Jolla in 1997. I had gone in order to orient myself in the academic discipline I had just joined, to attach faces to some of the names I had been learning in seminars. I didn’t know much, but I was certainly familiar with Tony’s work and formidable reputation. On the last day of the conference he would deliver his seminal paper, “Where Was Salomon’s House.” Earlier, at a less memorable panel, I noticed a man in the audience with rumpled sport coat and florid tie (or was he wearing a t-shirt under his jacket?), stroking a bushy black beard. When discussion time arrived, he made a comment and I learned his identity. I remember my first thought: This guy is way too young to be Anthony Grafton. Indeed, I just did the math, and Tony would only have been forty-seven years old. Forty-seven! That can’t be right. Actually, yes, I’ve done the calculation again: forty-seven. [Expletive deleted.] On the occasion of Tony’s 65^th birthday, we celebrate his myriad accomplishments and thank him for his extraordinary generosity. We can also breathe a sigh of relief that finally his age is not too absurdly inappropriate to his achievements.

“What really interests me is how people do things,” Grafton has said. “I see that as the question that unifies my apparently completely disparate investigations of topics in antiquity, in the Renaissance, in the Baroque, and in the modern age.”

FROM JAMES AMELANG (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

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FROM RICHARD CALLIS (Current PhD Student)

What words are left to describe or praise Tony as a teacher, supervisor, mentor, scholar, human being or simply as Tony? His generosity and kindness, his jokes and anecdotes, his early morning routines and truffle hunting — we’re talking about a legend here. As it happens, I too have been fortunate enough to have gone with Tony and fellow hunter Jenny Rampling into the wild a few times, all of them equally memorable. Although Pastrami Queen and Tony the New-York-Tour-Guide ought to make an appearance here, I keep my graftonianum more visual. Once in the New York Society Library Tony, Jenny and I got a little too excited about an annotated Paracelsus and before we knew it “Rare Book Twister” was caught on tape. Another visit brought the three of us to the New York Academy of Medicine. After a brief lunch consisting of food and anecdotes, we quickly found ourselves in this scenic room, on the hunt for marginalia and monades. There and then Jenny took this photo that illustrates my relationship with Tony better than I could possibly describe in words.

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FROM  FREDERIC CLARK (PhD Princeton 2014)

Anyone who has known Tony Grafton as a teacher, a mentor, or a colleague cannot feel anything but continuous astonishment at his endless generosity. I have never encountered a scholar who is so unfailingly giving of their time, their insights, and their energy. All of us who have worked with Tony, in whatever capacity, constantly marvel at that energy, wondering how there can be enough hours in the day for all that Tony does, and does in constantly superlative fashion. One answer to this mystery, I believe, is that few people in the world have as much sheer fun doing what they do as Tony Grafton. He brings an infectious level of delight to every component of the life of a scholar and a teacher, and he never tires of new travels, whether literal, metaphorical, or both.

I’d like to recount but one example of Tony’s zest for scholarly adventure. Although Tony’s research has led him to mine numerous European libraries, often during summer travels, he is constantly on the lookout for materials closer to home, many of which are hiding in plain sight, as it were. In the spring of 2014 he found out that St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers possessed a heavily annotated copy of Erasmus’ edition of the Opera omnia of Jerome. Tony quickly proposed an expedition, and so one Friday in late April he and I and another Graftonian, Maddy McMahon, caught an 8am train from Grand Central and embarked upon an annotation expedition. From Metro North to a cab ride we finally arrived at the seminary, and armed with laptops and cameras we set to work flipping through the many volumes of Erasmus’ Jerome. The annotations did not disappoint, and we found our anonymous reader eagerly digesting everything from Erasmus’ vita of Jerome to the humanist’s mini-treatise on how to recognize a forged or spurious text. Since there was no place for lunch in walking distance, we ate in the seminarians’ refectory, and then we worked until closing time, before beginning our long peregrination back to NYC. From there we headed to dinner at an Italian cafe and ended up talking late into the night. Tony makes “work” feel not like work at all, but rather a constant adventure. Whether such adventures take him to London or Leiden, New Jersey or Yonkers, he constantly marvels at the many remnants of the past he uncovers, and never tires of sharing that deep sense of wonder with others.

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FROM DEBORAH KROHN  (AB Princeton 1983, MFA Art History 1987, PhD Art History Harvard 1992)

My first memory of Tony is at a freshman event at Princeton in the fall of 1979. We were sitting around the fountain at the Woodrow Wilson School on an early September evening and he regaled me – though no doubt there were others listening – with tales of his early years growing up in New York City, attending Trinity and the University of Chicago, and arriving at Princeton. His warmth and humor, and the fact that I had a similar background, helped me to adjust to the very different social and academic world that I had just entered, rather unwittingly. Over the years, he has been teacher, mentor, friend and quasi-mythical figure, magically appearing before us in Manhattan, Florence, Berlin, Rome, and Oxford, where he taught the kids to punt while feeding legions of ducks that followed us as we progressed to a riverside pub. His influence on my work through his books and articles has been immense, in ways that are impossible to quantify, as is the case for so many students who passed through his classes and have continued to follow him, but I have been supremely fortunate to have shared many family meals over the years, and through these conversations have been inspired and delighted beyond words.

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FROM TAMARA GRIGGS (PhD Princeton 2003)

When I first met the renowned Scaliger scholar back in the mid 1990s, I was expecting something like the “poor learned gentleman” from Edith Nesbit’s story of the amulet. Instead, I found myself in the genial hands of an intellectual omnivore who wore Cosby-style sweaters embroidered with German-speaking penguins. I had arrived at Princeton after a long year in a San Francisco law firm counting billable hours and engaging in the smallest of talk with insurance litigators. I had forgotten what a real conversation felt like until I walked into Tony’s office at Dickinson, which at that time resembled a hoarder’s paradise. Tony graciously leaned back in his chair and nodded soothingly as I made my own small talk about the campus services and amenities of Princeton. Then he gently and improbably steered this inane patter to Castiglione’s Cortegiano, the subject of my long-forgotten senior thesis, and ever so slowly he turned the mental gears I had let rust back into something resembling movement.

One day in our History of Rhetoric seminar Tony stopped in the middle of a discussion to ask, offhand, “does anyone recall the extraordinary moment when the pope almost expelled the Jews from Rome?” We looked down and then at each other to see if we were alone in our ignorance. Tony took that as a “no” and launched into what we expected to be a remedial lecture on a well-known episode in early modern history — one that had somehow escaped us as we were furiously preparing for our General Exams. We began taking notes, but soon the story took some strange turns and one by one each of us gradually put our pens down and leaned back in our chairs. The relief in the room was palpable. Tony was telling a joke – and a great one at that — all about a wordless debate of gestures in which the friendly and bewildered chief Rabbi crosses the Tiber and shows the pope and cardinals his lunch consisting of oranges and matza bread. To this day I can never get the order of this joke right. It figures. Even Tony’s jokes are inimitable.

Confucius once asked (or was it Bob Hope?), “Isn’t it a pleasure to study and practice what you have learned?” Then he added, “Isn’t it also great when friends visit from distant places?” Doesn’t that sound like Tony?

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FROM MAXIM BOTSTEIN (BA Princeton  ’14)

When I arrived at Princeton as an undergraduate, I remember feeling somewhat out of place and even considered transferring to another school. Luckily I found myself in Tony’s own precept for his lecture course on Western civilization. When I spoke to him about my misgivings, he invited me out for lunch at Nassau sushi and patiently talked with me for what seemed like hours. I think there are very few people in the world so generous with their time and attention as Tony, and I am deeply grateful to him for being such a remarkable teacher and mentor.

I am also deeply grateful to him for introducing me to the cinematic masterpiece that is The Crimson Pirate.

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FROM JOHN RAIMO ( BA Princeton ’08)

Where does one begin with anecdotes about Tony? His unfailing humor, erudition, and culinary adventures would vie for the honor. Dinner tables might nevertheless prove the missing link. My career as a historian truly began in Tony’s kitchen at Oxford, where he very graciously hosted former Princeton students and others to chew over Gibbon, early modern history, and historiography. The joy of those talks never left me; indeed, none of our conversations with Tony ever do seem to come to an end, do they? Years later, we met for dinner at a Paris steakhouse before wandering into nearby bar (where Tony’s experiences in German academia quickly put me to shame). We then navigated several closed metro lines to find our respective ways home. It was only the next morning that I realized that we had somehow stumbled into “Decline and Fall,” Marc Bloch, and Begriffsgeschichte again somewhere underground at Châtelet – Les Halles.

There was also the one time that I and Adam Flynn (one of Tony’s BA advisees) published a ninety-five point indictment of him as a wizard and necromancer in the main undergraduate magazine. Tony had it posted outside his office door the very next morning.

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FROM TINE LUK MEGANCK (PhD Art History at Princeton 2003)

In 2006 I received the wonderful news that Tony had been awarded an honorary degree from the University of Leiden. I surfed to the university website and found this picture of Tony, in full lecturing furor. At the time I was collaborating at the exhibition  “Rubens, A Genius at Work” in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. I had just studied the oil sketch of a Head of a philosopher as well as Rubens keen interest in physiognomy and I could not resist seeing similarities between both men. While times and customs change (“O tempora, o mores”), some inner essence remains, I was thinking, maybe a little much influenced by both (?) masters. The encounter of images reminded me of Tony’s simple response, when, as a doctoral student in art history at Princeton, I was hit by a moment of doubt. Was it really possible to understand neo-Latin philosophy, early modern-cartography and religious polemics, all in order to make sense of some sixteenth century artworks? “If they could know it all, we can know it all,” he said, and I have never forgotten.

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FROM MANU RADHAKRISHNAN (PhD Princeton 2012)

I found my dissertation topic thanks to Tony.  I had planned for years to write on Rome during Avignon as I thought that the assumption that, in the Common Era, the history of the papacy and the history of the city were coterminous was responsible for the fourteenth century being shortchanged in the history of the Urbs.  I planned to fill this gap using unedited notarial protocols and papal letters.

I arrived in Rome in October 2006 and realised to my dismay that no-one had told me that finding the right dissertation topic was just like dating.  One had to have chemistry with the sources and with the person one hopes to date.  It turned out that working with my sources was just like dating DF (a perfectly lovely guy): I couldn’t, alas, get it up for either!

While preparing for my Rome Prize interview under the eaves of Palazzo Farnese at the Ecole Française, I had a coup de foudre while reading the chapter on the 14^th century in the Storia dell’Italia Religiosa: four pages on a Pisan Dominican who had translated Latin texts and penned devotional treatises all in the vernacular.  I realised that his oeuvre might shine light on that most elusive of creatures, lay piety.  I decided then and there that I would break my engagement with Popeless Rome and instead write my dissertation on Domenico Cavalca (c. 1270-1341). Shortly thereafter, I returned for a short visit to Princeton confused about how to proceed.

Tony has a marvellous ability to match a student’s interests with historiographical lacunae. When he heard that Cavalca had translated Acts, Jerome’s letter to Eustochium, Gregory’s Dialogues and the Liber Vitaspatrum, as well as composed nine devotional treatises, and, more importantly, that I had no idea where to begin, he said, “You know Manu, no-one has really worked on vernacular hagiography.  Scholars have focused instead on Latin hagiography.”  That was enough for me.  Tom Head had instilled a love of hagiography at the GC, I had long felt the siren call of Late Antiquity, Cavalca’s Vita dei Santi Padri was a late medieval “bestseller” whose success was unexplained, andecce agnosco novae praesentiam flammae.  This time there was abundant chemistry and I eventually produced a dissertation.

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FROM JONATHAN SHEEHAN (UC Berkeley)

I like to imagine that I was adopted into Tony’s intellectual family in the fall of 1999, on a sunny afternoon at the Strada cafe in Berkeley. I didn’t know it at the time, or at least before I sat down at the table. But afterwards — after Tony gave me notes on a still creaky dissertation, and after I ran to the library to start chasing down the new ideas that we had drawn up over coffee, and long after that too—I realized that I had found the conversations that mattered to me. Over the next fifteen years, the conversations went on. Around different tables to be sure. A table in Princeton, another in Wolfenbüttel, in Berlin, in Utrecht, joined by different members of the many tribes that Tony gathers together. The conversation topics have shifted over the years, and new people come to the table all the time — the family is alive and well. I still have the notes from that first meeting on a shelf, my scribbles of new names, books, questions, and ideas, but also an entry-ticket into a vibrant intellectual world. Long may it continue to thrive!

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FROM JESSICA R. FRIEDMAN (BA Princeton ’81)

Even before I came to Princeton in 1977, I knew I wanted to study with Tony Grafton. Debby Silverman, a family friend, had raved about him in trying to persuade me to attend Princeton, and I already knew that I wanted to major in history. So during my first freshman semester, I took History 345, Renaissance and Reformation.

Although I was lucky enough to have Tony as my preceptor, and I remember (I think) having precept in his office, I can’t say I remember much that was actually said or discussed in the class. (Years later, I learned that I was 30% deaf and probably had been ever since I had the measles at six months.) But I do remember doing reading for the class outside 1915 Hall, my freshman dorm, overlooking what used to be the tennis courts. Also, I have the rough draft, dated November 23, 1977, of my first (and only?) paper for that course, which was called In Search of Security: Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and Thomas Campanella’s City of the Sun, with Tony’s comments:

“Jessica – this is already very neatly written though you indulge bit too much in the passive voice. What it needs, is a bit more reflection on motives-why these two men agree so strongly on the potential of man’s control over nature and yet disagree so completely about how that control was to be attained.?) How do you account for this? By the transitional nature of the science of the time? By inclusion of magical and empirical elements that we see as contradictory but these men did not? By the men’s backgrounds? By their social positions? The consideration seems needed just because so much of your paper deals with the differences.

You might say a bit more about the scientific techniques mentioned by Bacon (esp. the blueprint for collaborative experimentation and theorizing).  Then the contrast with Campanella’s magico-mathematico-astrological science would emerge even more clearly. As it is, you say more about the results of science in the two states (?) than about the nature of science as an activity. ”

Although I am sure that these substantive comments were very helpful at the time, it was his first comment within the draft,” don’t split infinitives,” that burned itself into my brain. Even now that it apparently is acceptable to split infinitives, I have a hard time breaking that rule and each time I do, I think of Tony. (I also think of Tony’s admonition each time I watch an old episode of Star Trek and hear, “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”) The comment about the passive voice also stayed with me, and I have made it many times in commenting on papers written by own children and on contracts that I review in my work as a lawyer. On the final paper, I got an A-, with the comment, “Very good piece of work, clear, coherent, and pretty exhaustive,” although where I had written “[Bacon’s] Utopia, New Atlantis, centers around a continuous, collaborative effort to achieve human dominion over nature,” over the words “centers around,” he had noted, “a physical impossibility.”

I also have my final exam booklets from that course. The only comment over both exam booklets appeared in the first essay, which was about Petrarch’s “Letter on the Ascent to Mount Ventoux,” where I referred to the Quattrocento. The comment consisted of one word: “No!”

Tony became my academic advisor, and senior year, he became my thesis advisor. My thesis was an extension of my second junior paper, which, like my first one, had been written about a document that a professor wanted someone to write about. In this case, the professor had been Natalie Davis, and the document had been a pamphlet that accused Catherine de’ Medici of being a witch. Of course, there was much more to it than that. For my thesis, I decided (or perhaps Tony and Natalie did) that I would compare the court pageantry devised for and by Catherine de’ Medici with that devised for and by Elizabeth I and analyze how effective each queen was at getting the populace to accept the political messages that she sought to convey through the pageants. Tony had me working with a two-volume set of books written by John Nichols in 1788 entitled The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, which was a key source since it supposedly contained eyewitness accounts of Elizabeth’s pageants. The only problem was that Princeton didn’t seem to have the second volume. But Mount Holyoke did, so in December 1980, Tony arranged for the history department to send me to Mount Holyoke, where I sat in a dark library for three days copying the information I needed. I felt like a professional scholar, having to travel to study the necessary sources. (Later, I discovered that Firestone had had the second volume after all.) In May 2010, almost 30 years later, while at Princeton for the day with my son Aron on a college visit, I was having lunch with Tony while Aron attended a class. We were talking about my thesis. “I remember when you sent me to Mount Holyoke to get some book,” I said. I couldn’t have remembered the name of the book if someone had offered me a million dollars. “Ah yes,” he said, without missing a beat, “the Nichols.”

After that same lunch, Tony walked me to meet up with Aron for a campus tour. I introduced them, and somehow it came out, as it always did, that Aron intended to join the Israel Defense Forces after college. Tony told him all about how his own son, Sam, had become a Marine pilot after attending the University of Chicago. (This was hard to grasp, since I have photos of Sam at the age of one, toddling on the grass outside Dickinson Hall.) Since most people at that time tried to discourage Aron from joining the military, I really appreciated Tony’s sharing this story.

Between 1981 and 2010, I visited with Tony a few times, including in 2001 and 2003, when I served on the History Department Advisory Council at Tony’s and Bill Jordan’s recommendation. It was a real thrill to serve on the Council and to meet with Tony and Bill no longer as a mere undergraduate student, but as a professional equal. But some of my fondest memories of Tony involve Aron, who came to Princeton in the fall of 2011 as a member of the Class of 2015.

When Aron started at Princeton, of course I encouraged him to take a class with Tony, but he informed me early on that it probably wouldn’t happen because he wanted to take so many politics courses. So I was thrilled when he told me that he would be taking Tony’s History 448 (An Introduction to the Discipline) this past fall. But, he warned, “you can’t say anything [to Tony].” (Aron and I have different last names, so it wouldn’t have been obvious from our names that he was my son.) I was pretty sure that Tony would remember Aron, not just from the visit, but because I had e-mailed Tony to tell him that Aron had been admitted, and I had also asked Tony what he thought of a particular professor whose course Aron was thinking of taking; but as instructed, I said nothing.

Aron was as impressed by Tony as I had been back in 1977: “If only every professor at Princeton were as good as he is,” he said. One day, Aron called me and said, “I think Grafton mentioned you in class today.” I asked what he meant. Aron said that Tony had been talking about former students who had come back to visit and that he had mentioned “one woman who brought her son, who had won a prize for her thesis.” That may have been a subtle hint to Aron, because of course, Tony knew who he was the whole time, but he didn’t let on until the end of the course.

This past January, when I was at Princeton for a class event, I had the privilege and pleasure of spending three hours with Tony while I waited for Shabbat to end and he waited for students to complete an exam in one of his courses. We had planned just to meet for coffee, but the time just flew. He showed me the library renovations, and I got to see his secret office, and we talked about all kinds of things, from Princeton past to Princeton present to his post-Princeton future to what happens to our children when they grow up. It was just wonderful.

But the best part happened completely by chance. As Tony and I sat in Frist opposite the coffee bar, Aron happened to come around the corner. He wasn’t looking for me – he had no idea I was there at that particular point in time – so it was totally by chance. Of course, he stopped to talk with us. We all love to share experiences with our kids when we can, and it had been a really special treat to have Aron talk to me during the semester about his experiences in Tony’s class. But it was another thing entirely to see him and Tony actually talking together. Those few minutes of live conversation with the two of them meant more to me as a former student and current parent than I can possibly explain. I will cherish that memory for the rest of my life.

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FROM D. GRAHAM BURNETT (Princeton)

It is a great pleasure to take a moment to cast my mind back across the innumerable acts of human generosity and scholarly fellowship received at the hand, lip, and pen of Anthony T. Grafton over the last twenty-five years. Where to begin? Perhaps with the memory of those many Friday mornings during my junior year as a Princeton undergraduate, those Friday mornings when, promptly at 7am, my (landline) telephone would ring — my wakeup call from Professor Grafton, a kindly agreed-upon indication that we were shortly to meet for our weekly tutorial in early modern Latin. It is uncommon for a chaired professor to condescend to a private reading class with an undergraduate — it is something closer to unheard of for said professor to extend the intimacy of his pedagogical ministrations all the way to the bedside table, so as to make absolutely certain that his sleepy pupil missed not a moment of the appointed lesson!

And then there is the matter of that particular micro-cassette recording. For a time, this object made a small circuit among a coterie of cult-like devotees of Grafton’s power: in the recording (I made them of our translation sessions because it was so difficult to keep up) one can hear clearly that Grafton is both:

• reading directly into English from the Latin text a highly technical passage on the construction of a lens-grinding machine with multiple-geared axels set at oblique angles (a perfectly incomprehensible passage in any language);

• and…typing an email at the same time.

This in itself is pretty impressive, but what was comical/stupefying was the moment where I, the confused student, interrupt to ask how it is that the professor has construed a particular word beginning “uu…”. One can hear my plaintive, beleaguered, Friday-morning-before-9am, undergraduate voice bleat despairingly, “but Professor Grafton, that word is not in the dictionary.” To which one hears Grafton (still typing an email, his voice obviously directed toward the screen of his computer) explain patiently, “for sure — that’s because the first ‘u’ is an ‘n’ printed upside-down.”

It was a moment of great importance to me as a young scholar. Yes, there was the simple mastery that it reflected; but there was also what it implied about what it would mean to become a genuine interlocutor in the world of erudition before which I sat. Things as yet beyond my conception would have to become matters so obvious as to be entirely unremarkable. And that was remarkable. The distance between me and what it would be to be truly learned had just been measured in a 180-degree rotation. The letter had been turned upside-down. But so too, in a way, had been my understanding.

All of this was the Grafton sometimes spoken of on C floor of Firestone Library as “stupor mundi.” But in truth the moment that stays with me to this day as the most dramatic example of Tony’s magnificent generosity is that afternoon in 1996 when I chanced to check a cubbyhole assigned to me as an ABD adjunct instructor at Yale. I was, in that year, hanging on by a fragile thread: recently moved back to the US; completely confused about my dissertation; out of funding for my Ph.D. program; personally and academically unsettled. I hadn’t interacted with Tony in months, and had no reason to think he even remembered that I existed — much less was aware that I was struggling in a tender and transitional phase of scholarly maturation. The cubbyhole of an adjunct never receives any mail other than departmental flyers and periodic communiqués from the registrar’s office. But there, in the box, in an business-sized envelope of laid paper in an ivory hue, lay a one-page, typed personal letter, the contents of which may be summarized as simple and totally gratuitous encouragement: encouragement that I keep my wits about me, and my head down in my archival sources, and get my dissertation finished. It was, and remains, one of the very most remarkable moments of supportive fellowship I have been graced to receive across my ongoing education.

All of us who have worked closely with Tony have experienced, I think, the exquisite tincture of admiration and despair that such intimacy can occasion: admiration for a scholar so pure, so brilliant, and so spectacularly generous with his gifts; despair at the seemingly insurmountable challenge of aspiring to be the kind of thing that Tony so compellingly exemplifies — to be a true scholar and a true teacher, in the deepest possible sense.

Anthony Grafton embodies these ideals in ways that have changed many lives.