Philology as Science in 19th-Century Europe

Project Information

PhiSci

Grant agreement ID: 101042729

DOI

10.3030/101042729

EC signature date 7 April 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 464 300,00

EU contribution

€ 1 464 300,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PhiSci (Philology as Science in 19th-Century Europe)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Each age has its leading science: botany, philology, physics, genetics. But one of these things does not seem like the others. Few today would place philology – the historical study of text and language – alongside such life, exact, and physical sciences. In the long nineteenth century, however, philology led the pack in many ways: from pedagogical arrangements to large-scale, collaborative projects to state funding schemes. Small surprise that what contemporaries then called ‘big science’ historians now often refer to as queen of the sciences in that epoch: namely, philology.

PhiSci examines how and why philology achieved such extraordinary success in nineteenth-century Europe, the time when the research university was founded and modern disciplines were formed. Strikingly little work has appreciated the full diversity of activity and patronage, sites and networks, persons and objects in modern philology. Even less has investigated their organization into, for the time, a defining mode of building knowledge. This project thus pursues a central research question: How did philology converge into an integrated system of knowledge-production, one that could claim to be a universal approach to great diversity in cultural artifacts and to the human past?

By drawing on history of science, media theory, and informatics, PhiSci analyzes textual and linguistic study as a ‘science in the making.’ The research group thus uncovers how local practices, forms of representation, adaptations of instruments, and strategic cooperation merged into robust programs that generated stable knowledge and knowledge communities. Specifically, their work focuses on infrastructure, media, collaboration, and scholarly protocols and traces their impact across Semitic, Indo-Iranian, Romance, Germanic, Classical, and Sinological philologies. In doing so, PhiSci seeks to explain how philology operated as a diverse system of relations that projected a unity which enabled it to wield a scientific authority greater than the sum of its parts.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Made up of five core researchers, the project targets crucial aspects of nineteenth-century philology that have been previously undervalued and rarely understood in the work they do in producing data, evidence, and fact. Each member of the research group focuses on a different disciplinary constellation with its own history and does so with diverse methods and their own academic debates.

Paul Kurtz (PI) is investigating the history of infrastructure in Semitic philology. With a focus on Hebrew in Leipzig, Akkadian in London, and Arabic in Leiden, this line of research shows the affordances that were essential to making and transmitting philological knowledge.

Laura Loporcaro (Postdoc) is analyzing the history of practice in Classical philology. Centered on a cluster of key figures around F.A. Wolf, her research strand evaluates the construction and advertisement of a ‘modern’ philology and the ideal philologist.

Martina Palladino (Postdoc) is examining media history in Indo-Iranian philology. With a center of gravity in photographs, squeezes, and typefaces, this research line illuminates the material production of reproducible, homogenized, and workable textual data.

Christian Hoekema (Predoc) is studying the history of collaboration in Romance and Germanic philology. Pivoting on the Royal Historical Commission in Brussels, his strand uncovers how diverse actors with competing, often conflicting commitments could come together around a common philological agenda to make knowledge that was considered usable and valuable.

Yun Xie (Predoc) is inspecting book history in Sinological philology. Her line of research follows the colonial, technological, and aesthetic challenges that were encountered and overcome – or not – for the printing of Chinese texts in The Netherlands.

In addition to these five research strands, the PhiSci research group is organizing a series of collaborative workshops to bring in outside expertise and speak to larger questions. The first has explored continuity and change in the history of philology at the turn of the century, seeking to join two periods (before and after 1800) that are usually researched separately. The second event aims to document transfer, exchange, and cooperation between philology and other sciences – life, exact, physical – in the nineteenth century. The third hopes to uncover commonalities and differences between what are now distinct philological fields to consider what has held or could hold together the study of text and language across time and across the globe. The fourth workshop considers the legacy of nineteenth-century philology today in the digital humanities.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

PhiSci was created to deliver a sophisticated, synoptic, and integrated explanation of philology as a onetime leading science in modern Europe. The research is designed to avoid dangers common to work on the history of philology. The vast majority of literature is ‘insider’ in nature, with accounts written by and for specialists within a field and driven by dynamics internal to that field. Most is fragmented in scope or teleological in tone: focused on the biography of great scholars, generation of influential results, or legacy of specific institutions. When multidisciplinary, studies are mostly confined to one national or linguistic tradition. When multinational, they are usually restricted to a single discipline. Even as this insider perspective has increasingly turned to self-reflection (sparked by digitization, praxeology and postcolonial critique), its interest in the past is often limited by its concern with present practice: how to make textual study better, different or more prominent today. Internal accounts thus tend to tell narratives of progress, stress ‘right’ vs. ‘wrong’ results, laud schools of thought and scholarly heroes, or aim to nourish their own fields. By contrast, ‘outsider’ accounts written by historians are frequently unaware of key sources, unschooled in technical philological methods, untrained in disciplinary logic, and unfamiliar with formative developments. This lack of subject expertise inhibits a finer analysis and deeper understanding of philology’s inner workings.

The research group, whose members are partly trained as philologists, partly trained as (art) historians, therefore has joined forces to analyze not only the composition of this scientific ensemble – material and immaterial, individual and collective, human and nonhuman – but also the contingency (not inevitability) of its making. It is precisely this holistic approach that is needed to assess philology in the long nineteenth century, from its predominance in research to its prevalence in education to its prestige in European cultures. The project is fundamentally transnational and transdisciplinary, with a temporal frame to track continuity and change in this decisive period in the history of the humanities.

G. Budé, De l'institution du prince, 16c; Solomon Schechter in Cambridge University Library 19c