"Renowned historian Anthony Grafton invites us to see the scholars of early modern Europe as laborers. Bookish but hardly divorced from physical tasks, they were artisans of script and print. Drawing new connections between text and craft, publishing and intellectual history, Grafton shows that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands"--
Making book: the way of the humanists -- Humanists with inky finger -- Philologists wave divining rods -- Jean Mabillon invents paleography -- Polydore Vergin uncovers the Jewish origins of Christianity -- Matthew Parker makes an archive -- Francis Daniel Pastorius makes a notebook -- Annius of Viterbo studies the Jews -- John Caius argues about history -- Baruch Spinoza reads the Bible -- Conclusion: What the ink blots reveal.