This book describes the later life of Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), the most original scholar of the late Renaissance. It concentrates on his efforts to date the main events of ancient and medieval history, a study that required him to use both astronomical data and philological methods. Volume I of this study was published in 1983, and received wide critical attention. Praise for Volume I: "A work of rare excellence, a masterpiece that fuses fastidious philological analysis and deft intellectual synthesis and that addresses the traditional concerns of the classicist and the historian with equal sophistication, and high accuracy."-- Speculum "[Grafton] has done a signal service to Renaissance studies...anyone interested in late Renaissance humanism or in the history of historical writing cannot afford to ignore it."-- Renaissance Studies Anthony Grafton is at Princeton University.