The Idea of the Humanities has been designed to do justice to Crane as a humanist—a scholar not limited to any particular subject matter or set of problems. The range of the book is immense. First of all, it spans three (or four) separate fields: the humanities, the history of ideas, and literary criticism and literary history. Its essays (themselves written over a third of a century) travel in time from ancient Greece to the immediate past…. We see Crane in many fields, in many moods, in many circumstances. (pp. 455-56)

[The] exploratory nature of Crane's work along with its abundance, is the main lesson this book has to teach. When we add Crane's various eminence as an editor, a bibliographer, an educator, and a reviewer to the command of many fields he demonstrates here, we have a diversity that few scholars can match. The point is...