The Warburg Institute, London, 24 September 2026
Anthony Grafton’s third and final E. H. Gombrich Lecture brought his investigation of Joseph Scaliger to its most human and uncomfortable conclusion. The previous lectures had established the extraordinary contradiction at the centre of Scaliger’s life: one of early modern Europe’s greatest critics of historical evidence nevertheless sustained a fictitious genealogy connecting his family to the della Scala princes of Verona. The final lecture asked the question that naturally followed. Why did nobility matter so much?
Grafton began with the Scaligerana, the conversations recorded by two young Frenchmen who listened to the elderly Scaliger at Leiden. These anecdotes reveal a scholar fascinated by the manners of princes, cardinals and noblemen. Scaliger could admire aristocratic courage and honour while being merciless about aristocratic vanity, ignorance and hypocrisy. This mixture of fascination and contempt became central to Grafton’s argument: Scaliger desperately wished to belong to a social order about which he was frequently deeply critical.
The origins of that identity lay with his father, Julius Caesar Scaliger. Grafton traced the gradual transformation of Giulio Bordone into Julius Caesar Scaliger and the construction of the family’s supposed descent from the rulers of Verona. Joseph inherited this identity while his father was still fashioning it and, unlike Julius Caesar, never really possessed another. More importantly, in sixteenth-century France the identity worked. Legal documents treated Joseph as a nobleman, while his learning brought him into aristocratic households and eventually into the orbit of Henri III.
The letters of the Florentine exile Jacopo Corbinelli offered Grafton an especially vivid way of reconstructing Scaliger’s social performance. Corbinelli was astonished not simply by Scaliger’s immense learning but by the apparent effortlessness with which he displayed it. Unlike scholars surrounded by commonplace books and annotations, Scaliger seemed able to answer questions immediately. His clothes, bearing and conversation similarly suggested the nobleman rather than the pedant. In Corbinelli’s memorable formulation, Scaliger had effectively extracted letters from pedantry.
This was one of the lecture’s most interesting insights. Scaliger did not merely claim nobility genealogically: he performed it intellectually. His scholarship possessed something resembling aristocratic sprezzatura. Arms and letters, traditionally treated as competing sources of distinction, appeared in him to have been reconciled.
The move to Leiden in 1593 complicated that achievement. Scaliger arrived almost as a prince of learning, escorted by horsemen, entertained by civic authorities, given an exceptional salary and freed from ordinary teaching obligations. Yet Leiden also placed him on a much larger confessional and intellectual stage. Italian scholars and Catholic polemicists were increasingly investigating the genealogy that had operated successfully within French society.
Scaliger responded by intensifying rather than moderating his aristocratic performance. He dressed conspicuously, displayed the ladder associated with the della Scala arms and distributed an engraved portrait advertising his supposed descent. At the same time, the Scaligerana reveal him returning almost compulsively to questions of social status. He discussed which families were genuinely noble, mocked the pretensions of others and insisted upon the antiquity of his own lineage.
Yet his conception of nobility could be remarkably hostile to the aristocrats around him. Princes were frequently ignorant, courtiers hypocritical and monarchs ridiculous. Nor did Scaliger adapt easily to the commercial society of the Dutch Republic. His insistence that accepting payment could degrade an activity produced one of the lecture’s funniest examples: his real grandfather, the Paduan illuminator and mapmaker Benedetto Bordone, was transformed in Scaliger’s telling into a gentleman who merely happened to practise such arts rather than performing them professionally.
Grafton sharpened the problem through a comparison with Justus Lipsius. Lipsius possessed a clear conception of what a modern aristocracy might actually do. His scholarship on Roman politics and warfare could contribute to military and political reform in an age of artillery and professional armies. Scaliger, despite his contempt for aspects of Lipsius’s scholarship, possessed no equivalent programme.
Here Grafton reached the central argument of the lecture. Scaliger wanted intensely to be noble but seemed to have remarkably little idea what nobility was for. The status itself had become the objective. The Renaissance ideal of combining arms and letters had consequently left him with an identity whose social importance was immense but whose intellectual purpose was increasingly difficult to identify.
The strain this produced was captured beautifully in Grafton’s description of Scaliger as a man with a sore that he could neither cure nor stop touching. His genealogy repeatedly returned in conversation because attacks upon it threatened something fundamental to his conception of himself. The fiction nevertheless proved remarkably durable. Leiden commemorated Scaliger after his death as though his descent were genuine, while later members of his family even employed his published genealogy when defending their noble status before French authorities.
The lecture ended with the judgement of Scaliger’s former pupil Hugo Grotius. Grotius remembered him as one of the most learned men who had ever lived and as fundamentally a good man, but he did not believe his descent from the princes of Verona. More damagingly, he recalled that Scaliger had refused an opportunity to test part of the family story against archival evidence. To Grotius, that refusal suggested concealed falsehood.
It was an appropriately unsettling conclusion to the trilogy. Grafton never allowed the exposure of Scaliger’s genealogy to diminish his admiration for Scaliger’s scholarship, intellectual courage or astonishing learning. But contextualising Renaissance genealogy could only explain so much. The greatest historical critic of his age appears eventually to have protected his own identity from precisely the methods of criticism he applied to everybody else.
Grafton ended with a wonderfully understated regret: he wished that a scholar of Scaliger’s extraordinary achievements had wanted something more interesting than membership in an ancient noble family. It neatly captured the paradox running through all three lectures. Scaliger devoted his life to recovering truths buried in the past, yet when the past concerned himself, there were some truths he seemingly preferred not to uncover.
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