What are the implications of ‘the erotics of pedagogy’ in a post-Weinstein world? Constanze Güthenke’s new monograph does not explicitly answer this question – but it does contribute to an ongoing disciplinary debate about the (potentially toxic) discourse of scholarly passion which has long and silently underpinned the ideal of philology and the study of antiquity (Altertumswissenschaft). The romanticization of the lone scholar, divorced from all cares and domestic concerns, and engaged in an unending and ultimately solipsistic love affair with the past, has often shaped our discipline more profoundly than we might acknowledge, even on a semantic level. Güthenke’s painstaking, careful dissection of this ‘passionate’ rhetoric sheds new illumination on what has frequently been conceived as the most abstruse of fields – nineteenth-century German philological scholarship.

Taking key figures as case studies, including August Boeckh (1785–1867), Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1858), Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1848–1931) and Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), Güthenke explores the myths and discourses that animated classical philology during this period – the figures of Pygmalion and Plato’s Alcibiades loom especially large. Indeed, Alcibiades’ speech in the Symposium is explicitly construed as ‘highlight[ing] the scholar’s predicament in any dialogue with the past’ (11). Explorations of individualism, organicism, romanticism and the idealization and praxis of Bildung combine to form a rich tapestry of themes which Güthenke is able to analyse holistically, yet in impressive depth.

In theoretical terms, the monograph draws substantially upon Begriffsgeschichte (‘conceptual history’), as well as the relatively recent ‘emotional turn’ in historiography. It is also notable in its explicit exploration and valorization of paratexts – those throwaway prefaces, acknowledgements, and other marginalia that are sometimes considered wholly irrelevant to the ‘great thoughts’ contained within the body of a weighty academic tome. As Güthenke rightly notes, however, ‘introductions, public lectures, and letters are an integral part of scholarly work and scholarly knowledge, not a lesser frame’ (11).

One of the book’s greatest strengths, however, is its firm rebuttal of the overly prevalent notion that German classical scholarship represented ‘a sterile dominance of institutionalized historicist tedium’ (1). However professionalized the discipline might have become as it moved from the Socratic model towards a more Platonic paradigm during the course of the nineteenth century, ‘from … sympotic sociability … to … pedagogic communality’ (49), it was shaped at every turn by the language of love, and by the constitutive tension between ‘science’ and ‘spirit’. The language of a ‘longed-for and yet sublimated proximity’ (2) half-masked and half-revealed scholarly anxieties about the inability of Altertumswissenschaft to recreate the fragmentary record of the ancient world holistically, and the gendered personification of antiquity frequently lends many of these texts a quasi-erotic tone. Boeckh’s ‘great love … with which so many have embraced philology’ (117) could easily encounter all the fears and disappointments of a one-sided romantic union that could never be fully ‘consummated’. The ‘drive’ or ‘desire’ for knowledge is rendered plastic not only in implicit, allusive fashion, but also in an explicit series of Platonic intertexts, crucial to scholarly self-fashioning, which ranged from Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia (1759) to Wilamowitz’s Platonic biography. In this domain, physical closeness serves as a metaphor for knowledge, and protestations of scholarly passion always risk the possibility of being enspanned in a knowing double entendre.

Overall, Güthenke’s work encourages us to interrogate the metaphors that tacitly sustain our disciplinary discourse, exploring precisely what it might mean to claim a ‘true affinity’ with antiquity, and what limits we might set when imagining its contours. In the minds of these German scholars, this imagined antiquity often takes the form of a lissom, nymph-like figure inviting some historicizing caress. To conclude (in slightly facetious vein): if ‘cognitive strain … can be articulated [as] a code of love’ (47), then many readers will find much in the pages of this book to stir their enduring affection.