"I have always loved the holy tongue"

Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar's already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1550-1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot's Middlemardz. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in the world of books, With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto ken, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning and adds this ancient lore to the well known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek.