Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities by James Turner (review)

Notre Dame professor James Turner analyzes the surprising fact that today’s “humanities” disciplines—classics, English literature, foreign literatures, anthropology, linguistics, religion, and archaeology, to name the most sizable departments—date only from the late nineteenth century. Yet their common ancestry—indeed, their methodological basis—is found in the work of Greek and Roman scholars editing and explicating illustrious ancient texts. Greek scholars were the first Western philologists. They compared manuscripts (scrolls), attempting to establish the “original” text and always intent on considering their historical and linguistic context. Antiquarian evidence (e.g., ancient coins and inscriptions) was used to elucidate these manuscripts. The primary object of philologists’ research in the earliest period was the works of Homer. Textual editing of classics, be they Greek tragedy, the Odyssey and Iliad, or biblical writings, remained the primary goal of scholars throughout the Renaissance and into the nineteenth century, when a major break—in a period of just a few decades—split philology as it had been understood into ever more specialized disciplines that ultimately evolved into college departments.

The purpose of Turner’s lengthy, demanding book is to show how and why this transition took place. His book is divided into three parts: (1) a summary of the work of the ancient Greek and Roman writers as practitioners of philology; (2) nineteenth-century philology in Germany, England, and the United States; and (3) a brief account of a sampling of departments of humanities as they arose in the nineteenth century and their further development and specialization in the twentieth.

Turner argues that philology began in Alexandria. The famous library there had acquired such an extensive collection of scrolls that it became necessary to catalog it—which led to the invention of alphabetization—and to develop textual methodologies capable of detecting corrupt manuscripts and of establishing the “best” version. Homeric textual scholarship became the primary subject for the earliest Greek philologists and remained so until the Christian era. Editions of the Iliad and Odyssey produced by the first librarian of the Library of Alexandria, Zenodotus (fl. 280 BCE), therefore constitute the earliest “critical editions” of any work.

The progress of philology continued and was codified during the Roman era by such scholars as Marcus Terentius Varro (d. 27 BCE), author of De lingua Latina, and the famed rhetorician Quintilian (d. ca. 100 CE), whose Institutio oratorio further refined the grammatical and rhetorical works of the Greek philologists. Works such as these had a decisive influence on scholarship through the Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance.

The same fervor that earlier had attached to the works of Homer was applied to biblical texts in the Christian period. These writings posed special problems involving competing versions of texts in Hebrew and Greek dating from various periods and from sources of varying reliability. These daunting problems were attacked using the same comparative principles developed by classical scholars. Knowledge of Greek, Latin, and, later, Hebrew, then as earlier, was a sine qua non. Language united scholars. Philologists in all of Europe could easily communicate, as the scholarly lingua franca remained Latin well into the nineteenth century.

A revolution in biblical and Greek studies occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, beginning in Germany. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn’s Einleitung in das alte Testament (1780) found evidence in neglected manuscripts that some books of the Old Testament had multiple sources; in other words, they were based on diverse manuscripts (and prophets). These claims were among the first manifestations of what later came to be called the “higher criticism,” a term that set the new biblical criticism apart from the earlier practice that had merely sought to provide the best text. At about the same time, the Greek and Roman classics underwent a radical reinterpretation. Christian Gottlob Heyne, a colleague of Eichhorn at Göttingen, applied the “new” interpretation to the works of Homer. A student of Heyne, Friedrich August Wolf (who later wrote the first biography of Winckelmann), founded a...