Review: Anthony Grafton, ‘Genealogy: Forms and Uses’ – E. H. Gombrich Lectures 2026, Lecture II

The Warburg Institute, London, 23 September 2026

The second of Anthony Grafton’s 2026 E. H. Gombrich Lectures returned to the problem established so effectively in the first: how could Joseph Scaliger, one of the most formidable historical critics of early modern Europe, have been so thoroughly deceived about his own past? If the first lecture exposed the extraordinary genealogy constructed by Scaliger and his father, Genealogy: Forms and Uses placed that fabrication within the wider practices of sixteenth-century scholarship. The result was a lecture less concerned simply with catching Scaliger in a falsehood than with explaining how historical criticism and historical invention could coexist in the same learned mind.

This contradiction was made particularly vivid through Grafton’s treatment of Scaliger as a detector of forgery. Scaliger possessed an extraordinarily developed sense of historical evidence. Faced with monastic documents, charters and diplomas, he could scrutinise chronology, handwriting, formulae and material form for signs of fabrication. Grafton quoted Scaliger’s wonderfully visceral description of suspicious documents as assaulting his nostrils with the “stench of falsity”. Yet Scaliger’s approach was subtler than simple debunking. He recognised that medieval communities sometimes produced false documents not necessarily to deceive, but to reconstruct rights or circumstances once recorded in genuine documents that had subsequently disappeared.

The irony, of course, was unavoidable. Here was a scholar capable of subjecting the documentary claims of others to remarkably sophisticated criticism while defending an invented account of his own ancestry. Grafton made the contradiction still sharper by showing that even Scaliger’s formidable critical apparatus could fail. His analysis of a supposedly suspicious university diploma, for example, could employ impeccable antiquarian reasoning while reaching the wrong conclusion because the comparative evidence available to him was incomplete. Methodological sophistication did not guarantee historical truth.

This point opened into the lecture’s larger argument about genealogy. Genealogical writing was not simply bad history practised before the arrival of modern standards. It possessed conventions, purposes and forms of evidence of its own. Scholars such as Onofrio Panvinio reconstructed the histories of great Roman families while acknowledging the enormous gaps created by time. Others filled those spaces through conjecture. Genealogy therefore occupied an unstable territory between antiquarian research and imaginative reconstruction, particularly when family honour was at stake.

Grafton’s comparison between Scaliger and other genealogists was especially revealing. Like his contemporaries, Scaliger attempted to create continuity across centuries of political collapse, migration and missing evidence. Conjecture could bridge the gaps where documents could not. What distinguished the Scaligers was the scale and immediacy of their claims. Whereas fantastic genealogies often projected their inventions into a safely remote antiquity, Julius Caesar and Joseph Scaliger constructed an elaborate recent history connecting themselves to the della Scala rulers of Verona. The closer the fabrication came to the present, the easier it became to test – and ultimately to dismantle.

One of the lecture’s most suggestive moments came near its conclusion, when Grafton introduced John Dee as a possible parallel. Dee’s famous genealogical claims connected his ancestry to Cadwaladr, Arthur and the ancient British past. Like Scaliger, Dee could practise exacting historical criticism in one context while accepting strikingly expansive claims when genealogy and personal identity were involved. Grafton was careful not to reduce either man to credulity. Instead, the comparison revealed something more interesting about learned culture: scholarship was conducted by people whose critical practices existed alongside ambitions, loyalties and social needs.

That social dimension ultimately provided the lecture with its strongest conclusion. Genealogy belonged to a world in which learning, status and mobility were intimately connected. Scholars moving among courts, universities and aristocratic patrons had powerful reasons to construct identities that could operate within those environments. Scaliger’s imagined ancestry consequently becomes more than an embarrassing exception to an otherwise brilliant scholarly career. It exposes the conditions under which scholarship itself was practised.

If the first lecture presented the puzzle of Scaliger the critic and Scaliger the forger, this second lecture made the contradiction historically intelligible. Grafton’s Scaliger emerges neither as straightforward fraud nor innocent victim, but as a scholar capable simultaneously of extraordinary scepticism and extraordinary belief. The deeper question left hanging for the final lecture is therefore an enticing one: how could those apparently incompatible intellectual selves inhabit the same learned life?

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