Those were the days. In early modern Europe, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the humanities held pride of place in the world of scholarship. In its centre was the study of classical texts and methods. However, in the seventeenth century, change was in the making, or so modern historiography insisted. As Anthony Grafton wrote in his book Defenders of the Text (Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 3–5), many historians ‘have agreed that newer men with newer scientific brooms swept the humanists from the center stage of Western thought after 1600’ – men such as Francis Bacon or René Descartes. Grafton disagreed with those historians, pointing out that the two cultures, of humanists and natural scientists, were intertwined until well into the Enlightenment and that sometimes ‘the scientists proved to be better readers of texts than their scholarly friends.’

The history of science, from its earliest times to the present, is flourishing: the impressive volumes of the Cambridge History of Science are a case in point, but what of the history of the humanities? The editors of the conference volume The Making of the Humanities I: Early Modern Europe mean to make a start and remedy this historiographical gap. Their chosen method is aimed at the development of a comparative history of the humanities, in the period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, taking into account their interconnections and their relation to the natural sciences wherever possible. For greater clarity the contributions, all written by specialists in the chosen field, are grouped under a number of headings. The first, entitled ‘the Humanities versus the Sciences’, takes the reader not as he might expect to the opposition but rather to the links between the humanities and the natural sciences. Cynthia M. Pyle and H. Floris Cohen concur that during the Renaissance the natural sciences and humanism had many fruitful meetings. Their witnesses are the architect and philosopher Leon Battista Alberti and the musicologist Vincenzo Galilei, among others. In his excellent article, Cohen has the idea of cosmic, Pythagorean harmony destroyed in a concerted effort of the humanities and the sciences. In a later part of the book (‘Linguists and Logicians’) David Cram argues that early modern interest in relations between language and music led to entirely different views of both, foreshadowing the clear distinction between science and the humanities in later times.

In the section ‘The Visual Arts as Liberal Arts’ the combination of sciences and humanities reappears in Ingrid Rowland's bold essay on early modern representations of the world with the help of art (Raphael's ‘School of Athens’, for instance) and allegory. Marieke van den Doel explains the links between the neoplatonist ideas of the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino, especially those about the place of painting in the hierarchy of the liberal arts, and the works of painters such as Michelangelo who wanted to elevate their work to the status of the liberal arts. Thijs Weststeijn gives us a succinct treatment of the seventeenth-century fascination with pictography, ‘signs that signify by themselves’, such as Chinese characters, which might open the door to universal knowledge, coveted by Athanasius Kircher and other scholars.

The dangerous liaison between humanism and heresy is highlighted in the next section. Inevitably, the philosopher Giordano Bruno – burned at the stake in 1600 in Rome as a heretic – surfaces as a enigmatic figure using adventurous metaphors in the contribution by Hilary Gatti. About a century later, scholars in Rome were serving as papal censors while at the same time taking much intellectual pleasure in reading the books they sometimes had to ban (Bernward Schmidt).

The next three sections deal with subjects close to the heart of humanists: ‘Language and Poetics’, ‘Linguists and Logicians’, and ‘Philology and Philosophy’. Educating the young was of prime importance to humanists, so the contribution by Juliette Groenland about the popular early sixteenth-century Latin textbook of Johannes Murmellius, which survived well into the eighteenth century, is most welcome. The history of early modern literary criticism and the origins, in the eighteenth century, of literary studies as a scholarly pursuit (‘Literaturwissenschaft’) are topics covered by Cesc Esteve and Paivi Mehtonen respectively. Manuscript hunting and philological studies in the best humanist tradition took place, so Már Jónsson tells us, in Icelandic studies at the end of the seventeenth century.

Whoever thinks that grammar, rhetoric and logic are inextricably linked only during the Renaissance, will be surprised by Jaap Maat's valuable contribution on their ‘almost undamaged’ survival in the seventeenth century, focusing on the work of John Wilkins, natural philosopher and co-founder of the Royal Society. A perennial in early modern Europe is Bible studies: Piet Steenbakkers focuses on Spinoza's work as a biblical critic and philologist, whereas Martine Pécharman investigates the study, especially of the New Testament, of the seventeenth-century French scholars Richard Simon and Antoine Artauld.

The volume ends with two contributions on early modern historiography. Jacques Bos defends the view that under the influence of their own troubled times Machiavelli and Guicciardini dissociated the (Italian) past from the far more problematic present, developing a historical consciousness coupled with a learned profundity worthy of that of Leopold Ranke in the nineteenth century. Wouter Hanegraaff examines Jacob Brucker and his influential history of philosophy, published in 1766–1767. As a true child of the Enlightenment, Brucker sought to separate religion from philosophy and to distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false’ philosophy.

Although at first sight this conference volume may present to the uninitiated reader a jumble of highly specialized contributions on the history of the humanities during the early modern period, the authors and editors have succeeded in moving into the foreground the various scholarly fields that make up the humanities as well as their interplay with the natural sciences.