‘Philology: the love of words’ is the deceptively simple formula with which James Turner closes his book, a book as ambitious as the scholarship that it discusses. Beginning with the Greeks and ending with the professionalisation of Anglophone universities in the early twentieth century, Turner suggests that philology was the progenitor of the modern humanities, disciplines which were fostered by but then displaced it, as their practitioners became interested only in particular kinds of expertise and in talking to one another, forgetting its holistic determination to master authoritative texts; through texts, language; and through languages, the worlds of the people who had spoken them. Turner offers a grand yet neither Whiggish nor teleological narrative of this matricidal process, for his conviction that the humanities are now in an atomised and fragile state prompts him to cast a sceptical eye on their birth (p. xv). Like a good philologist, he takes a genealogical approach, but one that unsettles lines of descent and stresses continuities rather than speedy, linear progress of disciplines towards autonomy. To understand that ostensibly modern disciplines are part of the ‘philological family’ (p. 383) is to open up the prospect of not so much an interdisciplinary as a post-disciplinary future, in which ‘erudition’ and polyglot curiosity will again flourish (p. 386). Turner is just as sceptical of received ideas about when and how quickly the humanities became secular. The humanities turn out to have been more divine than human for much of their life: as philology often involved the study of the Bible, its persistence becomes code for the abiding centrality of the Bible to the history of scholarship.
The book's thirteen chapters offer an ‘empirical description’ (p. 381) of how and why philology became the humanities. They are necessarily selective, concentrating on the United States and on Britain (and within Britain on England). German scholarship does not so much take centre stage as serve as prompter and sparring partner for the Anglophone protagonists. The first four chapters introduce Turner's argument, briskly summarising secondary literature on philology down to the nineteenth century. Greece and Rome developed an interest in recovering authorial meaning through the collation of manuscripts, the use of commentaries and the eager pursuit of antiquarianism, while rabbinic Judaism was equally addicted to textual philology. The essence of philology emerges as ‘the hermeneutic circle’: the ‘straining to elucidate a difficult text by tacking back and forth between the text itself and its context’ (p. 170), an exercise which would both foster and require from its practitioners the sense that the past was ‘a foreign country’ (p. 39). Christianity had a disruptive if ultimately fertile impact on these philological stirrings, as its Bible became a master text whose meditative readers long had little interest in ascertaining the original meaning of its authors. While scholars from Valla onwards were determined to purge classical and biblical texts of anachronisms, they still did not acknowledge the temporal and cultural gulf between them and those texts. If the conflicts of the Reformation led ecclesiastical historians and antiquarians to scrutinise documents – as Gibbon later appreciated – they none the less assimilated the past with the confessional present. Yet Turner draws on the work of Tony Grafton and other historians of scholarship to show that seventeenth-century revolutions in biblical criticism transformed philology. The chronological studies of Casaubon and Scaliger, and the higher criticism of Spinoza, Simon and Le Clerc historicised the Bible, especially when coupled with the emerging view that languages embodied past human cultures. Succeeding generations deepened this approach and extended it to other fields, although there were false starts, such as the classical philology of Richard Bentley, which excelled at purifying texts through emendation, without recognising that they issued from a world different from his own.
The nineteenth-century chapters, where the energetic survey of secondary literature is enriched by much original research, are the most lively and extensive in the volume. Their intriguing periodisation pushes the decisive emergence of humanistic disciplines remarkably late into the nineteenth century. Turner ably describes how figures including William Jones, Schlegel, Bopp, Grimm and German higher critics and ancient historians from Michaelis to Niebuhr and Baur refined and expanded philology's methods and concerns, making it more contextual and more capable of tracking relationships between languages through time and space, yet suggests that in the Anglophone world their impact was to amplify a single, if fragmenting, philological tradition rather than to generate disciplines with peculiar techniques and concerns. Thus even John Mitchell Kemble, the Germanophile excavator of Anglo-Saxon England, mainly borrowed classical and biblical ways of reading in approaching other texts (pp. 154–7). The ‘drift towards differentiation’ of disciplines was ‘definite’ but not ‘decisive’ (p. 124) as the institutions that would have sustained them by employing scholars (universities) and huddling them in communities (learned societies) did not fully develop in the Anglophone world until after 1850. That dividing line is a serpentine one, which ripples as it crosses countries and cultures. In the United States the landscape was studded with relatively young, poorly resourced but adaptable universities, complemented by seminaries. It thus favoured the early emergence of Classics (in universities) and biblical criticism (in seminaries) as distinct disciplines. In England, a clerical and gentlemanly Oxbridge clung to Bentley and Porson's vision of classical scholarship as skill in versification and emendation. With Classics regarded as integral to elite culture and as auxiliary to the study of the New Testament, those who advocated the procedures of Heyne, Eichhorn or Niebuhr's Altertumswissenschaft were lonely if admittedly widely read outriders (Milman, Thirlwall, Grote).
Turner's arguments about change are as eye-catching as his interest in continuities. When disciplines did decouple themselves from philology, they did not do so in any single way or even always as humanities. Take anthropology. The ‘time revolution’ that dramatically expanded human prehistory encouraged a division of labour in which physical anthropology generated scientific knowledge about this wordless domain. Yet ethnology inherited the genealogical concerns of comparative philology, while the inspiration for J. G. Frazer's cultural anthropology was his contextual study of Pausanias and his exposure to William Robertson Smith's innovative biblical philology. If anthropology was philological, classical and biblical philology still supplied the matrix of its formation (p. 348). Linguistics is a similarly complex case: those who repudiated Max Müller's interest in locating the origins of religion through words adopted a synchronic approach that grouped their discipline with the sciences rather than the diachronic humanities. Turner does propose neater family trees alongside these gnarled examples. Literary critics borrowed their interest in embedding texts in historical context from philology and ‘interpretation’ specifically from biblical philology (chs vi, x). Archaeology long remained concerned with the elucidation of texts, not least because it was annexed to Classics and often happened in bible lands, while archaeologists fixated on monumental remains resembled the antiquarians who had always been auxiliaries to philology (chs vii, xi). History became more technical but also more philological as narratives had to involve close reference to documents. The book ends with the strange death of biblical philology. If biblical criticism became a discipline entombed in seminaries and university departments, which ceased to set questions for scholarship as a whole, then the study of religion remained recognisably philological in being a comparative and genealogical as well as an insistently textual pursuit.
Even allowing for its Anglophone focus and necessary selectivity, there are some strange omissions in Turner's book. Vico is passed over with the plea that he was not influential, but Ernest Renan without such justification. The book's emphasis on the multifarious, changing nature of philology is sometimes in tension with the urge to spot (approvingly) philological survivals in new disciplines. Turner's desire to equate philology with consciousness of historic distance can blur the line between it and antiquarianism – now the subject of a burgeoning secondary literature – and provoke doubts as to which one was the true parent of some of the disciplines that he describes. Moreover it sometimes unbalances the account of both classical and biblical philology. Turner barely mentions such vital defenders and excavators of the text as Karl Lachmann and Constantin von Tischendorf in favour of such familiar stars (or for Anglican clerics, bogeymen) as David Friedrich Strauss. He is surer on American soil than in Britain, where he sometimes overplays the power of the Anglican establishment and its agreement on what constituted orthodoxy and threats to it. He rather neglects not only Scotland and Ireland, but also many varieties of Protestant dissent. Finally, while his presentation of philology as the taproot of the modern humanities should revive interest in it, there are costs to this approach, such as a failure to offer any sustained discussion of interactions between its history and the natural sciences. These criticisms notwithstanding, Philology is an erudite and fluent work which will provoke historians of the nineteenth century to look again at how novel and how secular are the disciplines whose emergence they have long been disposed to celebrate.
