Synopses & Reviews
Many today do not recognize the word, but “philology” was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all other studies of language and literature, as well as religion, history, culture, art, archaeology, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word? In
Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university.
This compelling narrative traces the development of humanistic learning from its beginning among ancient Greek scholars and rhetoricians, through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment, to the English-speaking world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Turner shows how evolving researches into the texts, languages, and physical artifacts of the past led, over many centuries, to sophisticated comparative methods and a deep historical awareness of the uniqueness of earlier ages. But around 1800, he explains, these interlinked philological and antiquarian studies began to fragment into distinct academic fields. These fissures resulted, within a century or so, in the new, independent “disciplines” that we now call the humanities. Yet the separation of these disciplines only obscured, rather than erased, their common features.
The humanities today face a crisis of relevance, if not of meaning and purpose. Understanding their common origins—and what they still share—has never been more urgent.
Review
"[Turner] traces philology's origins and history, from Greek rhetoric to the Renaissance, on through the dawn of the modern humanities in the 19th-century and finally into its 20th-century decline. The story he tells is of a wide-ranging, all-encompassing field of learning that was forced to grow, evolve, and eventually spawn its successors over the centuries. . . . Thorough, occasionally wry, passionate . . . the sort of work that may be heralded as a masterpiece in the field."--Publishers Weekly
Review
"[Turner] undertakes the mother of all thankless tasks: a comprehensive history of 'the queen of the human sciences,' the multiform discipline of philology. It's a stupendous work of scholarship and synergy, and nobody knows better than its author the uphill struggle before it. . . . The end result is the best and liveliest book (indeed, one of the only books of its kind that I know of) about philology ever written."--Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly
Review
"A rich intellectual history of what many American scholars would describe as the long lost art and science of philology."--Peter Sacks, Minding the Campus
Review
"Very thorough and yet easy to read. . . . Scholars and students will find this a rewarding volume. Turner does a fantastic job of introducing how the history of philology is also, in turn, a chronicle of the various branches of the humanities and why looking at this connection might help demonstrate the humanities' worth among academic disciplines."--Scott Duimstra, Library Journal
Review
"James Turner's book on 'philology' must be the most wide-ranging work of intellectual history for many years."--Tom Shippey, Wall Street Journal
Review
"Sell all the books you have which purport to explain the nature of the academic disciplines and buy James Turner's Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. If you want to understand higher education in its current configuration of departments, divisions, and professional associations, I can commend no better book. . . . Mind-invigoratingly entertaining."--Timothy Larsen, Books and Culture
Review
"The fluent and highly accessible way in which James Turner, Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities at the University of Notre Dame, recounts the evolution of the science of philology makes for relatively easy reading, which is especially exceptional when one considers the complexity of the subject."--Lois Henderson, bookpleasures.com
Review
"The fact that I can't tell you exactly what Philology means--and I bet not many others can either--makes James Turner's book of the same name an intriguing prospect."--Julian Baggini, Observer
Review
"[A] substantial survey of the growth of scholarship. . . . Only a brute would resist his argument, since the volume of evidence he has amassed really does warrant the use of the verb 'amass', and his purpose is manifestly good."--Colin Burrow, London Review of Books
Review
One of The Times Literary Supplements Books of the year 2014, chosen by Thom Shippey
Review
Honorable Mention for the 2015 PROSE Award in Language and Linguistics, Association of American Publishers
Shortlisted for the 2015 Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa Society
One of The Times Literary Supplement's Books of the year 2014, chosen by Thom Shippey
Review
"[M]eticulously researched . . ."--Caroline Moorhead, Times Literary Supplement
Review
"[A] book written with passion and verve by an author who cares deeply about his subject."--Peter N. Miller, Times Literary Supplement
Synopsis
A prehistory of today's humanities, from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century
Many today do not recognize the word, but philology was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all other studies of language and literature, as well as history, culture, art, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word?
In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university. The humanities today face a crisis of relevance, if not of meaning and purpose. Understanding their common origins--and what they still share--has never been more urgent.
Synopsis
"This fascinating book makes a powerful argument: that the modern humanities derived in large part from the broad tradition of philology. This genealogy, Turner shows, clarifies the origins of both the modern research university and its disciplines, and explains similarities between such apparently diverse fields as history and comparative religion. He offers a compelling account of the role that biblical studies played in the intellectual history of modern Britain and America, and he makes sense of the development of modern literary studies in a way that no historian has managed to before. This is a gripping intellectual detective story."--Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
Synopsis
"Finally, we have a careful study of the historical foundations in philology of most of the modern humanistic disciplines. Turner shows in detail how these disciplines--including art history, linguistics, religious studies, anthropology, classics, and literary scholarship--developed out of philology in a dynamic similar to that by which the physical sciences emerged out of natural philosophy and the social sciences out of moral philosophy."
--David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley"This very important and necessary book displays the qualities that have long marked James Turner's scholarship--deftness, wit, and clarity. This is a work whose humanity matches that of its subject."--Michael O'Brien, University of Cambridge
"This fascinating book makes a powerful argument: that the modern humanities derived in large part from the broad tradition of philology. This genealogy, Turner shows, clarifies the origins of both the modern research university and its disciplines, and explains similarities between such apparently diverse fields as history and comparative religion. He offers a compelling account of the role that biblical studies played in the intellectual history of modern Britain and America, and he makes sense of the development of modern literary studies in a way that no historian has managed to before. This is a gripping intellectual detective story."--Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
Synopsis
Many today do not recognize the word, but "philology" was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all other studies of language and literature, as well as history, culture, art, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word?
In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university. The humanities today face a crisis of relevance, if not of meaning and purpose. Understanding their common origins--and what they still share--has never been more urgent.
About the Author
James Turner is the Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught in the History Department and the doctoral program in history and philosophy of science. He is the author of The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton and Religion Enters the Academy, and the coauthor of The Sacred and the Secular University (Princeton).
Table of Contents
Prologue ix
Conventions xix
Acknowledgments xxiii
PART I. FROM THE FIRST PHILOLOGISTS TO 1800 1
1. "Cloistered Bookworms, Quarreling Endlessly in the Muses' Bird-Cage": From Greek Antiquity to circa 1400 3
2. "A Complete Mastery of Antiquity": Renaissance, Reformation, and Beyond 33
3. "A Voracious and Undistinguishing Appetite": British Philology to the Mid-Eighteenth Century 65
4. "Deep Erudition Ingeniously Applied": Revolutions of the Later Eighteenth Century 91
PART II. ON THE BRINK OF THE MODERN HUMANITIES, 1800 TO THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY 123
5. "The Similarity of Structure Which Pervades All Languages": From Philology to Linguistics, 1800-1850 125
6. "Genuinely National Poetry and Prose": Literary Philology and Literary Studies, 1800-1860 147
7. "An Epoch in Historical Science": The Civilized Past, 1800-1850 167
I. Altertumswissenschaft and Classical Studies 168
II. Archaeology 184
III. History 197
8. "Grammatical and Exegetical Tact": Biblical Philology and Its Others, 1800-1860 210
PART III. THE MODERN HUMANITIES IN THE MODERN UNIVERSITY, THE MID-NINETEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 231
9. "This Newly Opened Mine of Scientific Inquiry": Between History and Nature: Linguistics after 1850 236
10. "Painstaking Research Quite Equal to Mathematical Physics": Literature, 1860-1920 254
11. "No Tendency toward Dilettantism": The Civilized Past after 1850 274
I. 'Classics' Becomes a Discipline 275
II. History 299
III. Art History 310
12. "The Field Naturalists of Human Nature": Anthropology Congeals into a Discipline, 1840-1910 328
13. "The Highest and Most Engaging of the Manifestations of Human Nature": Biblical Philology and the Rise of Religious Studies after 1860 357
I. The Fate of Biblical Philology 357
II. The Rise of Comparative Religious Studies 368
Epilogue 381
Notes 387
Works Cited 453
Index 509