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James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2014. xxiv + 550 pp.
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...