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.