* * *

Let me start with the less sympathetic book. Rens Bod is a professor of humanities (which might be thought promising) at the University of Amsterdam and (what turns out to be less promising) a linguist, whose works include Beyond Grammar (1998) and Probabilistic Linguistics (2003).

He wishes to defend the humanities against those who see them as “a luxury pastime which is of little use to society and even less to the economy.” He claims that a history of the humanities refutes this calumny. After all, “When in the seventeenth century Joseph Scaliger discovered that the earliest Egyptian kings were older than the presumed age of the earth, this led to a secular worldview where it was no longer theologians but citizens who had the last word.” Yet more wondrously, “A more recent humanistic breakthrough was the discovery that languages in Europe and Asia are related via sound shift laws. This pointed to a common linguistic origin known as Indo-European which completely changed our view of the relationships between peoples, for better and worse.” Hence “scholars . . . have changed the world” (xii–xiii).

This being so, it would make sense to write a history of the humanities. But which ones? This is not easy to decide, since the concept of the “humanities” is recent and various disciplines can be herded into the category. Bod is brisk.

An eyebrow already rises quizzically. Is this how they do things in Amsterdam? At American universities, there are seldom humanities faculties at all, but colleges of “arts and science,” which run the gamut from art history to zoology. At my university, we are divided with muddled indecisiveness into “schools,” one of which is called “Arts and Humanities,” the other “Humanities and Social Sciences,” in neither of which are there film or media studies. As it happens, the Faculty of History is in the latter school, but only a few of us, mostly economic historians and demographers, would be especially bothered if we were in the former category, and some of us (including me) would prefer it. A few years ago, migration was mooted, but the idea was abandoned when it was pointed out that social scientists have more money than artists, so it was best to hang about in the formers’ vicinity.

So Bod's book begins with a dodgy premise, which he believes sanctions a decision to go back to the ancient world, there to notice those intellectual enterprises which eventually become the modern humanities (as Bod defines them) and follow their course over the centuries. To this is added two more dodgy decisions. The less unhappy one is to include discussions of the intellectual cultures of China, India, and Islam. (Bod is apologetic about excluding Japan, Aztecs, Incas, Vietnam etc.) Doubtless this is partly influenced by the current vogue for the global, although Bod is not especially interested in the global circulation of ideas. Rather, it is influenced by the second, more unhappy decision that he should study “the methodological principles that have been developed and the patterns that have been found in the study of humanistic material (texts, languages, literature, music, art, theatre, and the past) with these principles” (9, original emphasis). The Chinese, Indians, and Arabs have principles and patterns, too, so they can plausibly be set next to those to be found in Aristotle or Franz Bopp. The more principles and patterns the merrier, one might infer, though in fact Bod prefers to whittle them down.

As a humanist, presumably in the business of changing the world, you might care to know what these principles are. Bod makes it easy to tot them up, since in his text he helpfully puts them in italics—he likes italics—and the index lists thirty-three of them: the biblical coherence principle, analogy, example-based description, hierarchical analysis, logical consistency, and so forth. Patterns seem to be less abundant, since only thirteen are indexed: these include “from descriptive to prescriptive,” rhizomatic, spiral, “from voiceless to voiced,” and “from voiced to voiceless” (379, 377).

The title proclaims this book to be a history, but it is not, not really. It is, rather, a grid. History is divided up, conventionally, into periods (ancient, medieval, early modern, modern), despite the fact that Bod is dealing with cultures like China to which such periodization is irrelevant. Within each period, he methodically hunts down and—or so it feels—occasionally invents the principles and patterns discernible in those humanistic enterprises he has chosen to identify, as they are self-consciously explained by, or more usually can be inferred from, the texts of great thinkers (Herodotus, Augustine, Al-Tabari) and, very frequently, lesser lights. For each chronological section, there is a tidy conclusion which attempts to sum up how things are going, what common patterns and innovations have emerged, whether there has been progress. Bod is anxious that there be progress.

I make it sound unconvincing, do I not? Taken in the round, it is. The premises are wrong; the conclusions are uninteresting; the expositions are plodding and occasionally impenetrable; and, what is least forgivable, it reads as having being written by someone with little sense of what the humanities ought to mean, for it is devoid of subtlety, texture, wit, or imagination. At the risk of maligning a discipline, I infer that this has something to do with Bod being a linguist of the modern stripe, if that is now a discipline for which principles and patterns matter, as they do very little for the rest of us. And yet this is probably a book worth reading, for there is much interesting material made available by it, often material of which most readers will be ignorant. Bod is doggedly thorough in documenting branches of the humanities less often in intellectual repertoires. Musicology especially benefits from this. But profit comes mostly from his narrating non-European thinkers. Doubtless linguists routinely know that grammar was invented in India by a Sanskrit scholar called Pāṇini in the fourth century BC, but I did not. Apparently, he identified 3,959 grammatical rules, a fact which elicits awed enthusiasm from Bod, who likes a rule. Did you know that the “most important Chinese musicological work in Antiquity is credited to Liu An (179–122 BCE),” evidently a “colorful character” who, by the by, invented tai chi (43)? But there are obscure Europeans, too. Apparently “Pseudo-Hucbald's innovation was the first step towards the famous solmization of Guido D’Arezzo (991–1033)” (110). “Buridan (c.1295–1358) was probably the most important logician of the late Middle Ages”; in his hands “syllogistics was transformed into something that had never previously been shown” (126). If you have read Gilles Deleuze, you may already know that a rhizomatic structure is “a network that fans out sideways and consists of a multiplicity of junctions without a clear beginning or end” (344). I did not.

Bod's method, explained in an appendix, compels rigidity of form. He reads the original texts, more or less literally, and is, understandably, only lightly informed about the historiography of his many periods, cultures, and topics. In so reading, he cares for the principles that, he thinks, inform Herodotus’ history, but he does not care for funny stories about Egyptians; for the rules of logic, but not for how Ramism stiffened New England Calvinists; for the principles of poetics, but not for how Jonathan Swift contemplated ladies’ gossiping at the card table about his own death. (“The Dean is dead: [and what is trumps?]”) One can see why Bod cannot care. As he notes, the subject matter of the humanities is most of what human intelligence has fashioned for about the last 2,500 years and even an indefatigable Dutch scholar would hesitate to tackle that. Yet since subject matter and principles are everywhere inextricably interwoven, only to notice the latter necessarily means misunderstanding the latter.

Almost always, Bod is cheerful. In his conclusion, he points gladly to “new psychologically motivated testing methods in language, music, literature, and art”; to the digitization of sources, which will occasion “not just new understanding but also new questions”; and to “the integration of supra-disciplinary methods from the humanities, sciences, and social studies,” and thereby the creation of new disciplines. Everyone everywhere will be in conversation and all will be well, for are not “the humanities doing better than ever” (362, original emphasis)?

* * *

James Turner doubts it, although he agrees that change is our fate, that “stasis will not serve,” and that the humanities will be re-formed (386). Unlike Bod, however, Turner turns his face against eclecticism and endless interdisciplinarity, even against giving all times and places equal billing. For he thinks he knows what the humanities really are, even though most of us have forgotten that reality. It seems we are all philologists, all lovers of, makers of, and students of words and language—or we used to be. This contention shapes the book, which is a history and not a grid. Indeed it is arguable that the book is, at bottom, an account of the emergence of the modern historical consciousness. Unlike Bod, Turner studies what he thinks he can reasonably understand, which is mostly Britain and the United States, with a few excursions elsewhere—notably to India in the eighteenth century—when his scholars travel to or take an interest in languages beyond Europe. He claims not to do much with continental Europe, yet German scholarship inevitably looms large in his narrative, and the odd Frenchman and Italian appear, too. Like Bod, Turner goes back to the ancient world, but only by way of establishing how the concept of philology was first defined, and then, after mostly ignoring the Middle Ages, when “the philological legacy of antiquity survived, thin and pale” (28), he speeds through the Renaissance and early modern period to reach the year 1800, which is roughly the moment, he claims, that the modern humanities began to appear, as the disparate stepchildren of philology. He is clear that there is no such thing as the humanities before the nineteenth century, although he spends more than a hundred rich pages on what was antecedent. As Turner sees it, by 1800 the enterprise of philology encompassed classical and biblical studies, scholarship on Sanskrit and Arabic, literary studies, theories of language and linguistics, and historical writing. All of these used the comparative method, understood change over time to be crucial, and described genealogies.

This is a richly satisfying book. It is learned, written with deft wit and sympathy, and wryly humane. Turner's dramatis personae are more than names attached to ideas and texts, but real people, warts and all, fairly but unsparingly characterized. His portrait of Richard Bentley is especially satisfying, for doing justice to both Bentley's brilliance and his brutal vanity. Moreover, Turner is alert to institutional contexts. He cares how universities work, libraries structure knowledge, and print culture operates. Still, he is the sort of intellectual historian who sees little need to explain ideas by reference to social contexts or cultural history. If the rise and fall of philology can be explained by social change, the explanation is not on offer here. Turner is, however, alert to national idiosyncrasies, whilst also giving the impression that scholarship should be seen as a cosmopolitan enterprise, such that the logic of ideas has its own force, which somehow transcends particularisms.

Philology is, in many ways, an old-fashioned book, which earns its place in a long line of scholarly books about scholarship: works like G. P. Gooch's History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913), J. E. Sandys's History of Classical Scholarship (1921), René Wellek's History of Modern Criticism (1955–92), and, lately, J. G. A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion (1999–2015). Like the best of these, Turner's work is full of descriptions and estimates of great, good, and not-so-good scholars whom we are invited to respect and who, it is claimed, have somehow formed what we are. They sit in studies and libraries, stand in lecture halls before wooden benches and occasionally attentive students, and peer myopically at inscrutable texts, understood by themselves and two others, one of whom lives in a minor German town. They seem all to pose like Erasmus in Albrecht Dürer's 1526 portrait, a cheap reproduction of which I used to have on my study wall, by way of a chastening reminder of what I needed to value. It is a world easy to caricature, now that we are taught to value the demotic and mistrust the elitism of the dry-as-dust. Lytton Strachey, with his usual unfair wit, once described the world of learning that Bentley inhabited. Then, “Erudition was gigantic, controversies were frenzied, careers were punctuated by brutal triumphs, wild temerities, and dreadful modifications. One sat, bent nearly double, surrounded by four circles of folios, living to edit Hesychius and confound Dr. Hody, and dying at last with a stomach half-full of sand.”Footnote ² Turner smiles often enough at human folly to understand this image, even sometimes to play with it, but his purposes are more serious.

He wishes us to understand that scholarly controversies dealt with issues that mattered, even to those not scholars. Most people may or may not have cared whether Homer was a real man, full of rhythmic lines, or only sundry compilers of folk tales, but almost everyone cared whether the Bible should be read and edited like any other literary text, and these concerns were interconnected because the philological techniques necessary for understanding Homer could be deployed to deconstruct the Pentateuch. If there is a central theme to Turner's book, it is how philology contributed to the partial disenchantment of, if not the world, then at least the intellectual world, mostly against the will of the philologists. In the index, the entries that refer to the Bible and biblical studies take up two full pages, and Turner is plausibly insistent that such studies were the most important interlocutors that informed the development of even secular linguistic and literary studies. This was so because the Bible passed from being a fixed and sacred text beyond comparison to being a sacred miscellany of ancient documents placed in contested historical and cultural contexts, to being a text comparable to other such religious texts (the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the epic of Gilgamesh), to being an interesting example of ancient literature and myth. Sometimes religious scholars had ideas that changed how the secular approached their non-sacred texts (Shakespeare, Chaucer), sometimes it worked the other way around, but usually there was a shared problematic, the working out of which had unpredictable consequences, as when the speculations of British orientalists like Sir William Jones invented the Aryan.

With one major exception to be discussed later, many elements in this narrative are familiar. I doubt that Turner would claim that his early pages, that take us to the year 1800, are anything other than efficient statements of what is scattered in books by the likes of Arnoldo Momigliano, Anthony Grafton, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and Rudolf Pfeiffer. Students of Zenodotus of Ephesus and the cataloguing system of the Alexandrian library need not fear startling new insights. The text becomes bolder when it reaches the eighteenth century, but again, if you have read Joseph Levine on the battle of the books or Hans Aarsleff on the early history of linguistics, much will seem as it was. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are Turner's métier and there he deals not only with what we already know—Moses Stuart and the Higher Criticism, George Ticknor on Spanish literature, J. G. Frazer on totemism and golden boughs—but also with many figures, here resuscitated and nicely evoked, who turn out to have been significant. (Indeed there are so many of these that, occasionally, the wood disappears behind the trees.) Most, for example, will know little or nothing about William Robertson Smith, latterly Adams Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge, who wrote on Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (1885) and The Religion of the Semites (1889) and who understood the ancient Jews as one among many Middle Eastern tribes, “the Arabs, the Hebrews and Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, the Babylonians and Assyrians” (367).

But what to make of Turner's main contention, that philology underpins the modern humanities? He makes an intricate and powerful case, but I am not entirely convinced. For one thing, there is some straining towards the end of the book, when, he claims, philology is morphing into our humanities, when disciplines such as (to use Turner's list) “archaeology, art history, classics, social and cultural anthropology, history, literature, linguistics, and religious studies” (382) acquired their modern forms and are supposed to have moved from being nuances within philology to being independent enterprises, forgetful of their origins. With evident reluctance, Turner is often obliged to acknowledge other formative influences, not philological, that emanate from both social science and even natural science. Newton, Darwin, and Comte, for example, have links to philology that are barely discernible, yet it would be difficult to deny that they, too, have been among the progenitors of the humanities.

My main problem is that Turner artfully turns away from what many, including me, would incline to think a more probable progenitor, if we are forced to plump for a single one (as we need not). That is, rhetoric. When discussing the ancient world, Turner sees rhetoric as subsidiary to philology, which he understands to be the more comprehensive enterprise. So he writes of “the four main strands of ancient philology—language theory, rhetoric, textual criticism, and grammar” (13). This strikes me as an odd assertion. Most scholars of the intellectual world of the ancients make little of philology, but tend to regard rhetoric as the overmastering enterprise. There is a mass of scholarship on ancient rhetoric by George A. Kennedy and many others, yet comparatively little on philology, which tends to be regarded occasionally as an endeavour (interpreting or reading texts), but mostly as an attitude (the love of words and learning). Hence, in Latin, a philologus was someone who was learned, but this told you little about the nature of the learning and tended to describe a consumer rather than a producer of words, the latter being someone who acted in the world, was most valued, and needed the skills of rhetoric to be effective. True to this, a hefty handbook on The Classical Tradition, edited by Grafton, Most, and Settis, contains a long article on rhetoric, but none on philology, a term that does not even occur in the index.Footnote ³

As I understand it, the usual view is that “rhetoric played the central role in ancient education” and was regarded as the most comprehensive tool for understanding the human condition, because it dealt with persuasion, which required words (whether oral or written), and these words settled into patterns, what we would call genres: deliberative, forensic, and epideictic oratory; history; the various forms of poetry (epic, lyric) and drama (comedy, tragedy); and so forth.Footnote ⁴ Each genre had its own techniques and tended to one of three styles (the sublime, the middle, and the plain). So understanding the world was intrinsically mediated by rhetoric—that is, what was seen and how it was represented were indissolubly connected. The skill of the representation was the measure of how clearly one saw, and so style was much more than decoration and pleasure.

Genres, however, had a hierarchy. History, for example, was regarded as a lesser genre, as Aristotle made clear when he said, in a famous passage that has stuck in the craw of many historians since, “Poetry is more philosophical and more elevated than history, since poetry relates more of the universal, while history relates particulars . . . A ‘particular’ means, say, what Alcibiades did or experienced.”Footnote ⁵ It was not that the particular was discreditable, it was just that history's particularities were merely useful; they served those genres which, more grandly, either could claim philosophical universality or were, as with oratory, acting immediately in the world. That is, history offered narrative and facts, which greater genres might use for greater purposes, whether it be understanding the human condition (as Sophocles and Plato did) or influencing whether Athens should go to war (as Demosthenes did). History's role was mainly to work as intellectual manure. As Quintilian had it, history was “a rich, sweet sap” and “a prose poem . . . written to tell a story, not to prove a point . . . wholly designed not for practical effect and present conflicts, but to preserve a memory for future generations and for the glory of its author's talents.”Footnote ⁶ Being secondary, history required a style neither too plain (which oratory needed to be) nor too ornate (which poetry sometimes was), but should have a workmanlike grace and embody the middle style.

Turner has a better case for the importance of philology in the early modern world, for it is indisputable that then something approaching an intellectual discipline of philology appeared. Still, even then, as he rightly says, “rhetoric, textual philology, grammar, antiquarianism—formed a single world of erudition” (64). And even then, though rhetoric was beginning to lose its dominance, surely it remained more important than philology. Thinking otherwise leads to some misunderstandings. For example, when Turner discusses the Scottish interest in rhetoric in the eighteenth century—the lectures of Adam Smith, the volumes of Lord Kames, Hugh Blair, and the rest—he dubs this as a “revival” (105), yet this seems doubtful, for it is hard to see that rhetoric had so died away in the seventeenth century that it needed to be revived. The nineteenth century, yes, but not the seventeenth. Quentin Skinner's Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, for instance, nowhere discusses philology, but rather contends that Hobbes's writings “reveal a deep absorption in the rhetorical culture of Renaissance humanism” and, in this, Hobbes was not atypical.Footnote ⁷ Even Grafton, when seeking to explain historical writing in early modern Europe, understands the difference between such writing and modern historicism as arising from a disentanglement from rhetoric, but that this, though incipient earlier, is not accomplished until the late eighteenth century.Footnote ⁸

None of this disavows the immense usefulness of most of Turner's book, a value found more in its finely grained details than in its master thesis, the foundational importance of philology to the creation of the modern humanities. That thesis feels overextended, because of the competitors and influences it declines to take seriously (rhetoric, natural science, much else) and what it makes improbably coherent and dominant (philology itself).

Turner begins and ends his book with reflections on our present educational discontents. He has long been concerned with how universities configure and convey learning.Footnote ⁹ This has been both the strength and the weakness of his accomplishment as an intellectual historian. Unabashedly, he thinks that the higher learning matters and this is refreshing in an age where most are very abashed about being learned and, as a consequence, seldom manage it as well as he does. On the other hand, Turner has not been much concerned with those intellectual genres which have, for the most part, flourished outside the academy during the period—the nineteenth century—which has been his preoccupation. That is, for example, he seldom discusses poetry, fiction, and drama, although he does care what an editor of Dryden might do or a literary critic of Emerson say. Nor does he much care for philosophy, a subject he resolutely excludes from Philology, puzzlingly so when one remembers how important has been the problem of language and consciousness to modern philosophy since Descartes.Footnote ¹⁰ That is, in his mature scholarship Turner most likes what is neither too abstract and grand (say, Kant) nor too demotic (say, penny dreadfuls), but is a discourse of the middling sort (say, indeed say often, Charles Eliot Norton).Footnote ¹¹ This may help to explain his strong preference for the sensibility of the nineteenth century, when it was still thought possible to devise coherent systems—as with Hegel, Marx, Comte, Darwin—yet there were enough ignorant armies clashing at night to fashion a satisfying texture of doubt, and many intellectuals of the middling sort tried to mediate. This preference has at least one significant implication. In Turner's work, modernism and postmodernism loom ominously and signify a world of meaning being lost and mere incoherence being gained. No doubt, his being a Roman Catholic intellectual is important here, for significant in the Catholic world view has long been the sense that once the world was coherently theirs and this world is now gone. It is not, of course, that Turner is a neo-Thomist or in denial about Galileo, just that he seems to have a sense that history goes from meaning to its loss and that it is our task to remedy the loss. Whether one sympathizes with this sensibility and aesthetic or not—some of us, after all, like Picasso and Charlie Parker—it has been responsible for fashioning one of the more remarkable oeuvres of any recent American intellectual historian or, to be more precise, Anglo-American historian. His is an accomplishment that has been underrated, because its preoccupations are unfashionable, but I am hard put to think of anyone better.

As to whether the modern university would be wise to remember the foundational role of philology in the fashioning of the humanities in order to assist a present task of refashioning, I am doubtful. If I was asked to choose (as I would rather not) between remembering rhetoric and remembering philology, I would choose the former. Turner is, to be sure, right to dismiss the feeble caricature of philology, now so common. As he says, “For most of the twentieth century, philology was put down, kicked around, abused, and snickered at, as the archetype of crabbed, dry-as-dust, barren, and by and large pointless academic knowledge” (ix). His book more than demonstrates that philology did have a point and not to see it is to miss much. I am less clear that Turner has refuted the accusation that philologists were often self-absorbed, overly technical, and indifferent to the aesthetic needs of their readers. Some wrote well, some did not, but it matters that there was nothing in the presumptions of the enterprise that required felicity. It was otherwise with rhetoric, which cared for both form and content. So, if we need to remember, Quintilian or Hugh Blair might be preferable to Horne Tooke, diverted in Purley.