Henricus Glareanus’s (1488-1563) Chronologia of the Ancient World

The humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries took a passionate interest in Livy’s History of Rome. No one studied the text more intensively than the Swiss scholar Henricus Glareanus, who not only held lectures on different Roman historians at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, but also drew up chronological tables for ancient history, which were printed several times in Basle, sometimes together with Livy’s History. Glareanus annotated his personal copy of the chronological tables and invited his students to copy his marginal notes into their own copies of the book. Three of these copies survived, and give new insight into Glareanus’s practices as a scholar and teacher. The notes they contain—and the way in which Glareanus used them as a teacher—are distinctive, and neither has had much attention in the past from historians of reading. This volume presents facsimile reproductions of the tables from one of the surviving copies, now kept in Princeton University Library. The high-quality reproductions include transcriptions of the handwritten notes, unlocking Glareanus’s teachings for a new generation of students and researchers.

Anthony T. Grafton, Ph.D. (1975) in History, University of Chicago, teaches European history at Princeton University. His special interests include the history of classical scholarship and the history of books and readers.

Urs B. Leu, Dr. phil. (1990) in History, University of Zurich, is Director of the Rare Book Department at the Zentralbibliothek Zurich. In 2010 he was a fellow at Princeton University Library. He has written extensively on Conrad Gessner and the Swiss reformation as well as the history of the book.

‘’Grafton and Leu’s edition, with its rich Introduction, impeccable transcription, and elaborated critical apparatus, certainly sets the standard for further paper editions of early modern libri annotati as well as for future commentaries to them and reconstructions of the processes that led to their creation.’’
Michał Choptiany, University of Warsaw. In: History and Theory, Vol. 53 (2014), p. 624.

“… an eminently useful tool for exploring the history of reading, teaching, and learning in the sixteenth century. … Grafton’s and Leu’s examination of the Chronologia allows us to examine and question other annotated sixteenth-century texts in a new light and suggests exciting new ways for us to understand the purpose behind and pedagogical usefulness of professorial and student marginal annotations.”
Eric J. Johnson, The Ohio State University. In: Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2015), pp. 152-153.