This chapter rearticulates its Romantic origins as a specificity of modern critical philology by turning to Friedrich Schlegel’s 1799 novel Lucinde and Schleiermacher’s 1800 reading thereof in Confidential Letters on Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde. It discerns in this pair of texts a founding scene of critical philology, in which the rules and criteria for interpretation are no longer assumed to be given in advance but are rather derived from the practice of the text in question. König distinguishes such philological practice in early Romanticism in Germany from later positivist philological practices in the nineteenth century. He traces the return and repetition of such critical hermeneutics in the work of late twentieth- to twenty-first-century philologists known for work on corpuses ranging from Greek tragedy to Paul Celan’s poetry to Sanskrit classics and their legacy in modern India, namely Peter Szondi, Jean Bollack, and Sheldon Pollock. He thus demonstrates the legacy of Romantic philology for the reading of world literature.

The origin and development of writing systems is examined, and the kinds of writing systems are characterized. What writing systems have in common and why is presented. The history and changes in the English alphabet are discussed. Assumed mystical and magical properties of written symbols are examined and explained. This provides the backdrop to explicating philology, about how old written attestations of languages can be utilized to understand more about the history of the languages themselves and the changes they have undergone.

Using tools from translation studies, this chapter seeks to analyse translations of Pindar in both systematic and historical terms. Metre is chosen as an ordering principle because it allows for an easier classification and understanding of various translation strategies that have been deployed (Holmes’ distinction between ‘analogical’, ‘mimetic’, and ‘organic’ strategies for translating metre turns out to be particularly useful here). But the detailed discussion of select translations – by Cowley, Hölderlin, Boeckh, Tycho Mommsen, and a host of more modern translators – automatically leads to other translatorial challenges posed by this poet, (in)famous since antiquity for his grandeur, variety, and difficulty.

This book is about the early evolution of the Persian language, specifically the emergence of Middle Persian from Old Persian in the time of the Achaemenian Persian Empire. The Introduction explains the project and defines critical terms. The concept of linguistic history is explained, followed by further notes on the critical use of certain terms and a sketch of the plan of the book.

This section presents the author’s conclusions and offers some outlook for further research.

The Introduction begins with a quote about the nature of decipherment by Alice E. Kober, a brilliant American Classicist whose work was instrumental in the decipherment of Linear B. This is followed by a section discussing proper and improper methods of deciphering undeciphered scripts, including the combinatorial or contextual method (a proper method), and the etymological method (an improper method). As an illustration of a sound and proper method of addressing the decipherment of the undeciphered Aegean scripts, Yves Duhoux’s eleven-step methodology for deciphering Linear A is discussed in detail, with reference to the ways in which the subsequent chapters follow that methodology with regard to each of the undeciphered Aegean scripts. The Introduction ends with a warning to the reader not to take the hypotheses in the book as more than hypotheses, followed by a brief presentation of the chronology used in the book.

This chapter discusses the discovery, in the modernizing of libraries and archives around 1800, of many medieval texts and literary remains. It traces how these discoveries triggered an interest in the medieval period and the rise of historicism: the cultivation of the past and the desire to turn it, and the nation’s ancient roots, into an inspiring contemporary presence. The impact of medievalism and historicism on the culture of nationalism, mainly in literature and in literary history, is surveyed across the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, the scholarly expertise of the philologists was a Europe-wide field, but their commitment was in most cases to their own countries, for which they claimed and appropriated literary heirlooms. The relations between philologists were sometimes collaborative, sometimes competitive, and competition often took the form of international rivalry.

The study of the history of English has its roots in the work of English scholars who first concerned themselves with the nature of their language about four hundred years ago. Prior to the eighteenth century this work was pre-linguistic, positing a divine origin for language and comparing English (unfavourably) to Classical Greek and Latin. With the advent of modern linguistics in Indo-European research, the history of English became an object of academic interest and the first university positions for its study were established, mainly in Germany and Scandinavia. Simultaneously there arose a tradition of studying English dialects, first as an antiquarian occupation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then later as an attempt to capture local history in the vocabulary of specific regions in the twentieth.  This then led to the production of dialect dictionaries and surveys.

Adopting a broad understanding of editing, this chapter views medieval and early modern text producers as precursors of present-day scholarly textual editors. The chapter surveys how editors from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century discuss their choices concerning the selection and reproduction of texts when making them available to contemporary audiences. Editors’ awareness of the historical nature of their project makes their work philological. The comments examined in the chapter are obtained from editors’ prefatory materials from three time periods: 1. the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, before the emergence of scholarly editing and the disciplinisation of English studies; 2. the mid nineteenth century – characterised by a more systematised activity in vernacular text editing and societies promoting it; 3. the twenty-first century, dominated by the rise of digital editing. The survey shows that editors of all three periods address textual selection and reproduction in their comments. Although editors in all periods sometimes arrive at similar editorial solutions, for example in favour of the faithful linguistic reproduction of the source, their decisions do not necessarily spring from similar motives. Throughout the three periods, editors convey their ideas of the target audience; readability is identified as a major editorial concern from early on.

This chapter articulates the book’s main intervention and contribution, ending with a brief discussion of the phrases “is a book” and “like a book.” Premodern writers who said something “is” or is “like a book” forged the very conceptual connection that How the World Became a Book traces through English culture. Contains six major sections covering the contribution and intervention of the book.

The first chapter sets out the stakes of Auerbach’s understanding of Renaissance art by beginning with “The Philology of World Literature” and ending with Henry James’ sentimental tourist in Venice. To be a sentimental tourist is to live an aesthetic life in history, and this chapter uses this point to sketch out a portrait of Auerbach’s work that emerges from a stress on Renaissance.

This chapter considers the syntax of Hopkins’s poems. It places Hopkins’s syntax in the context of his devotional and artistic life, showing how his sentences negotiate the conflicting pressures exerted by Catholic faith and poetic ambition, personal idiosyncrasy, and the desire to be ‘intelligible’. It also places the poems in the context of larger syntactical trends, showing how Hopkins’s phrasing works with and against the grain of nineteenth-century usage, and addressing Hopkins’s interest in and anticipation of developments in Victorian philology. The chapter pays particular attention to ‘Myself Unholy’, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, and ‘Tom’s Garland’.

The language of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry is notable for its imagistic intensity, for its intricate sonic patterning, and sometimes for its cryptic ambiguity. This chapter surveys several nineteenth-century contexts for Hopkins’s idiosyncratic diction. His interest in philology underlies his imitation of alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse and of the medieval Welsh system of versification known as cynghanedd, which involves complex structures of internal rhyme and consonant repetition. Additionally, like his contemporaries William Barnes and Thomas Hardy, Hopkins draws on regional dialect to capture the essences of certain landscapes, creatures, individuals, and trades. And given his predilection for neologizing and at times for elevating sonic gorgeousness over communicative clarity, he may also be read alongside Victorian nonsense writers such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Ironically, Hopkins’s interest in the deep roots of English drives his radical linguistic innovation – and his obscure vocabulary can allow him to channel modes of divinely inspired expression.

This chapter argues that we must understand Hopkins’s engagement with rhythm amid the cultural contexts of poetic experimentation and metrical and linguistic inquiry during the nineteenth century, a prosodic discourse in which Hopkins was a participant. Amid linguistic and religious definitions of tradition and rupture, Hopkins thought through several changing definitions of rhythm in language, in poetry and in the world. Our focus on sprung rhythm, though his most well-known innovation, clouds other theories of rhythms and important cultural histories of accent, speech, national identity, and religious identification that show the ways that accent and stress are part of a broader pattern – a broader rhythm he wants to detect – of likeness and difference in all things.

Lucian’s position as a commentator on religion has been debated intensely since late antiquity: for most of the last two millennia, it has been the main focus for commentators. This is primarily due to Lucian teasing Christians in a couple of places (although in fact they get off relatively lightly); but he is also, and indeed much more insistently, scathing about aspects of Greco-Roman ‘paganism’. This chapter begin by unpicking some of this reception history, and showing how modern scholarly perspectives remain locked into nineteenth-century cultural-historical narratives (which were designed to play ‘Hellenism’ off against ‘Christianity’, in various forms). It then argues that we should set aside the construct of Lucian’s status as a religious ‘outsider’— a legacy of nineteenth-century thinking — and consider Lucian instead as an agent operating within the field of Greek religion, and contributing richly (albeit satirically) to ongoing, vital questions over humans’ relationship with the divine. He should be ranged, that is to say, alongside figures like Aristides, Pausanias, and Apuleius as keen observers of the religious culture of the time.

What is literary data? This chapter addresses this question by examining how the concept of data functioned during a formative moment in academic literary study around the turn of the twentieth century and again at the beginning of electronic literary computing. The chapter considers the following cases: Lucius Adelno Sherman’s Analytics of Literature (1893), the activities of the Concordance Society (c.1906–28), Lane Cooper’s A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth (1911), and the work of Stephen M. Parrish c.1960. The chapter explains how the concept of literary data was used by literature scholars to signal a commitment to a certain epistemological framework that was opposed to other ways of knowing and reading in the disciplinary field.