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Reviewed by:
  • World Philology ed. by Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Kevin Ku-Ming Chang
  • James Clackson
World Philology. Edited by sheldon pollock, benjamin a. elman, and kevin ku-ming chang. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 452 pp. $45 (cloth).

Visiting Egypt as a student in 1987, I learned that archaeology students were able to get free entry to all sites and museums if they collected a pass from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. My college tutor was reluctant to write for me stating that I was an archaeologist, but he did agree to describe me as a philologist. On presenting his letter at the ministry, I was told that, since I was a philosopher, I was ineligible. “But no, I am described as a philologist,” I protested, with the result that the pass was forthcoming. Uncertainty about the meaning of the word “philology,” but a recognition of its worth, is commonplace in academia as well as in the Egyptian civil service. Often philology is presented as a hallmark of an earlier form of scholarship, sometimes worse but sometimes better. Thus, in 1925 Leonard Bloomfield could open the inaugural issue of the journal Language stating that “that noblest of sciences, philology, the study of national culture, is something much greater than a misfit combination of language plus literature.”6 As Sheldon Pollock notes in his stimulating introduction, in each of the last three decades, Paul de Man, Lee Patterson, and Edward Said have made “impassioned calls for a ‘Return to Philology’” (p. 5), although with widely diverging understandings of what philology means. James Turner has recently presented philology as the river from which the tributaries of nearly all modern disciplines of the humanities flow in Philology: The Forgotten [End Page 711] Origins of the Modern Humanities (2014). Philology is clearly important, but what is it exactly?

In the view of Sheldon Pollock, philology is about making sense of texts, and this book is both a manifesto for how making sense of texts has been and should be situated at the heart of all the humanities and an examination of how different cultures have made sense of their own texts. He has himself written previously about the challenge philology presents to scholars in the humanities.7 However, as he notes, “globalizing the intellectual history of philology and its practices is no simple matter” (p. 12). In response to this challenge, he and his fellow editors gathered some of the leading intellectual historians together at a conference entitled “The Global History of Philology” in Taiwan in 2008, with a further conference in 2010 in Shanghai, and the resulting papers form the backbone of this book.

At one level, World Philology can be read as a compendium of the history of scholarship across time and space. Indeed, it would be hard to find a better summary of the textual inquiries of humanists than Anthony Grafton’s chapter or of the reception of Philology and Linguistics in China than that of Kevin Kuming Chang. Other chapters, such as James Zetzel’s on philological endeavours in Rome or Yaakov Elman on the rabbinic tradition, are more personal takes on a subject, which are perhaps less easy as an entry for a nonspecialist. World Philology benefits, however, from having had its genesis in a conference, unlike most other companions and handbooks. The authors of the different chapters of World Philology have clearly learned from their interaction and have read each others’ chapters, with the result that the reader starts to share their delight in finding the links and disparities between traditions. The reader who cherrypicks the juiciest chapters is likely to miss some of the themes and connections that run through this work.

What is gained through the comparison of different traditions is certainly enough to justify bringing non-Western practices to the study of “classical scholarship” in Europe and the United States. Indeed, philology is a loose enough category that it is not difficult to swallow the argument that there are similarities in the place of texts in education and literary culture in nineteenthcentury Germany and imperial China, or in the editing of earlier texts and writing of commentaries by Renaissance humanists and...

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