Theme Issue 63
Philology Now
Edited by
Valeria López Fadul
&
Courtney Weiss Smith
Photo by Laura Olsen on Unsplash.
Issue Contents
+ VALERIA LÓPEZ FADUL & COURTNEY WEISS SMITH, Philology Now: Editor’s Introduction, History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
In this introduction to the “Philology Now” theme issue, we make a case for “philology” as a useful sign under which to consider the ways historians are already working with words in their efforts to understand the past. Doing so, we recognize that “philology” has been variously defined. Rather than being normative or prescriptive about what philology entails, we proceed from a historical awareness that, in many of its uses, the word binds interrelated concerns of language, history, and method. The articles featured in this issue take up this nexus as providing opportunities for theory of history. Together, they demonstrate how attention to philology's methods of treating words in history enables self-reflective work on disciplinary formations and their political legacies, on the relationships between language and power, and on temporality itself. It also enables innovative new approaches to words and concepts.
+ NANCY PARTNER, History and Theory and Philology Now: Together in Theory, History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
In English-speaking academe, philology has virtually disappeared as a defined discipline, although its traditional array of skills and techniques for reading, editing, and interpreting texts are indispensable to fields ranging from biblical studies through every language and literature and are central to historical research. Philology's status “now” seems to be that the analytic skills for dealing with texts, skills developed over centuries, have been appropriated by multiple academic specialties while the framework that used to contain them has been dismantled and nearly forgotten. From a historian's viewpoint, I track the lively resistance movement pressing for a return to philology and a turn to a “new” philology, a revived, recovered, restored discipline with its own coherent identity. This movement of renewal and restoration is complicated by the need to come to terms with philology's deep entanglement with racialist thought and anti-Semitism, a past that has indelibly stained the reputation of philology as a discipline. The guiding intent of this article is to bring philology, with all its complications, back together with history, its formerly yoked companion discipline, and inquire where and how theory emerges—a metaphilology analogous to metahistory.
+ HELGE JORDHEIM, The Stakes of Philology: Realities, Origins, Futures, History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
What does philology mean today? And what can it do in the future? In this article, I respond to these questions by performing—again—a “return to philology,” as Paul de Man proclaimed in the 1980s. To engage with the present and future of philology, I return to nineteenth-century Germany and to some of the controversies that played out between the main proponents of the new discipline, including Gottfried Hermann, August Boeckh, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. This was the time and place where philology came into its own and some of the discipline's stakes were spelled out for the first time. These stakes were both methodological and theoretical, phenomenological and ontological, and can be discussed according to their three main concerns: the struggle for the real, the possibility of origins, and the futures of the past. Invoking “Philology Now,” I argue, means bringing these stakes back into our discussion about history and theory.
+ ALEXANDRA LIANERI, Chronopolitics of Classical Philology Through the Non Sequitur, History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
This article argues that classical philology can play a vital role in debates about the importance of philology now and configures a genealogy that may contribute to the quest for alternative philologies. Building on Werner Hamacher's definition of philology as “love of the non sequitur,” I turn to founding texts of Western classical philology by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Friedrich August Wolf, and August Böckh in order to interrogate their identification with modern classicism and historicism. Examining the science of philology as Altertumswissenschaft, I focus on a language of ambiguity and undecidability with regard to philology's classical object (Greek and Roman pasts) and the discourse of philological science that constructs it. This is grasped as the relation between a transcendental temporality that enunciated classical antiquity's wholeness and a kind of perturbation of time that destabilized philology's alignment with classicism and historicism. For Winckelmann, Wolf, and Böckh, the philologist's task required a conceptual and temporal leap toward the past that signaled the absence of philology's grounding. In this sense, it differed from evocations of a seamless movement across a unified horizon of time linking antiquity and modernity. This was conveyed by stressing the past's mutilation, absence, and accidental expression as the vanishing ground on which philology could build its classical vision. By configuring these notions as the self-hollowing basis of its knowledge, classical philology came to be divided by a paradoxical appeal to sequential time and the non sequitur. Tensions produced in this context bring classical philology to the center of debates that seek to interrogate modern historical intelligibility and time. Far from perpetuating ideas of irreversible and linear time, classical philology claims to engage with an absent past, and as such, it disrupts sequential temporalities by desiring something that is always beyond presence or reach and therefore always available for times to come and for future emancipation from regimes of present time.
+ ANTHONY GRAFTON, Toward a Conjectural History of Conjectural Histories, History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
Most intellectual historians use the term “conjectural history” to designate a new form of speculative history created in eighteenth-century Scotland by Adam Smith and a few others. These writers traced the development of human society and culture through conjectural reasoning based on philosophers’ views about human nature and travelers’ accounts of “primitive” peoples. Their work had a deep impact on eighteenth-century philology: it helped to shape such original and influential studies of the ancient world as Edward Gibbon's history of the fall of Rome, Johann Joachim Winckelmann's history of the rise of ancient art, and Friedrich August Wolf's demonstration that Homer was an oral poet. But the connection between conjectural history and classical philology began long before any of the varied Enlightenments conjured up by modern scholars came into being. Conjectures about the past were deeply rooted in the central humanistic discipline, rhetoric; this gave Lorenzo Valla the tools for his conjectural refutation of the legend of the Donation of Constantine. But these same tools were plied with similar skill and originality by many other humanists, from Valla's contemporary in the Roman curia, Leon Battista Alberti, to the Jesuit historian of the New World, José de Acosta, a century later. And they saw them not as an innovation but as part of the philological and historical tradition in which they were grounded. Valla, for example, saw Thucydides—whose histories he translated into Latin—as a conjectural historian and thus identified conjecture as a central feature of historiography in the classical tradition.
+ DAVID B. LURIE, The Wind That Melts the Ice: Reflections on the Scale of Philology, History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
The global history of philology, like that of writing systems and other technologies, is characterized by diffusion and adaptation. These processes are made more difficult to grasp if we maintain a presentist focus on the Western philological tradition and its deeply Eurocentric legacy. Arguing against those who wish to resolve the problem by abandoning the term “philology” as irredeemably tainted, I propose that we introduce the notion of scale. Heuristically, it is helpful to think in terms of “small-p” philology, the low-level quotidian strategies and tools used by students and scholars to solve problems of textual interpretation, and “big-P” Philology, a larger ideological edifice linked to metahistorical and transhistorical narratives about abstract concepts such as civilization, race, and religious truth. As a first step toward illuminating this issue of scale, this article excavates a highly specific moment of philological scholarship in twelfth-century Japan and shows how a difficult word from a classical waka poem is explicated through the extension of an existing Chinese exegetical system. The example is taken from the Ōgishō, a pioneering treatise by the Heian period scholar Fujiwara no Kiyosuke (1104–1177).
+ ALAN DURSTON, Teaching Spanish in the Universal Monarchy: Tomás Pipin's Grammar for Tagalogs (1610), History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
In 1610, a Tagalog printer named Tomás Pinpin published a Spanish grammar in Tagalog that was intended to help natives avoid errors and misunderstandings in their interactions with Spanish colonizers. This article attempts to clarify the book's genesis and to contextualize it within the global expansion of Spanish. Pinpin exemplifies a pattern whereby Spanish was taught by colonial subjects on their own initiative and following their own criteria. At the same time, his grammar is associated with a missionary translation project in which the printers, among them Pinpin himself, were non-Spanish. This text thus offers an opportunity to broaden understandings of early modern colonial translation and linguistic description by stressing the creations of native collaborators.
+ ALEXANDER JABBARI, Cosmopolitan Philology and Sacred Grammar, History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
Persian developed a formal grammatical tradition comparatively late in its thousand-year history as a lingua franca. This article takes up the emergence of Persian grammar within the larger trajectory of Persian philology. It explores questions about why and when such a tradition developed in Persian by closely analyzing the earliest formal grammar of Persian in the language: Minhaj al-Talab (Program of Study; ca. 1660), which was written by a Hui Muslim scholar in eastern Qing China. This text is contrasted with a more mature later work of Persian philology from Mughal India: Musmir (Fruition; 1750s). Through comparative study of these texts and by drawing comparisons to Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, and other languages, the article complicates characterizations of Persian and the Persianate as cosmopolitan and explores the complex relationship between cosmopolitan and vernacular and between Persian and Islam. Persian has a sacred dimension for many Chinese Muslims, despite its primarily cosmopolitan function in Mughal India. This article concludes with a historical materialist analysis of the role of philology in general, arguing that the discipline is neither fundamentally reactionary nor colonial but rather a tool that can be used for multiple ends.
+ CLAIRE GILBERT, Dead Letters and Living Words: Iberian Arabism as Political Philology, History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
A surge of Arabic studies in Spain and Portugal during the eighteenth century responded to specific anxieties connected to national identities. Philology offered a means to contend with Iberia's Islamic past through present-day geopolitics that seemed to threaten national futures. A comparison of lexicographic projects from the last decades of the century shows how philologists relied on translation strategies of domestication and foreignization to recast the history of the Arabic language and its users in Spain and Portugal. Such strategies merged historical and ethnographic techniques that mapped peoples, places, and languages. Collectively, these projects contributed to a revised emplotment of al-Andalus as a vital space for intellectual encounter and especially the translatio studii that was credited as a source of Enlightenment ideals. It became a transhistorical resource for nationalist claims within and beyond Spain and Portugal.
+ RONIT RICCI, Implicit Comparisons: Visuality and the Interlinear Manuscript Page, History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
A central question for European philology, informed by various agendas and ideologies, concerned comparison and the positing of hierarchies among languages. With this “traditional” question of philology in mind, but hoping to think in less traditional ways, this article asks how comparative understandings of Arabic and local languages of the Indonesian archipelago may have been reflected in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Islamic manuscripts that contain interlinear translations. These Islamic interlinear translations contain a text written in Arabic with a translation into Javanese or Malay appearing in between the lines of Arabic text. Such translations often follow a word-for-word model, striving to replicate the source down to the level of prepositions and word order even when the result is far from idiomatic. Many questions could be asked about the translation of doctrine, values, and stories through these bilingual manuscripts. However, although I have been trained to examine texts for their content and literary dimensions, I will attempt to put these dimensions aside momentarily in favor of considering “sensory translation.” Doing so, I explore what visual aspects (including script size, ink color, and writing angle) might tell us about the “implicit comparisons” between languages as reflected on the page.
+ PETER DE BOLLA, On Concepts as Historical Forms, History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
What are the consequences of holding fast to the axiom that words are not the same thing as concepts? This article explores some of them in relation to the tensions between two different but overlapping approaches to the history of concepts: philology and computationally informed historical semantics. The methods utilized were developed in the Cambridge Concept Lab and essentially comprise a measurement for word associations that can then be exported into comparative frameworks for tracking the evolution of concepts over time. Some examples are provided using the dataset Eighteenth Century Collections Online that are intended to demonstrate the fecundity of computational approaches to the history of ideas and concepts. Throughout the article, a distinction is held between two interconnected terms: meanings and concepts—or to put that more pointedly, the hard case of distinguishing between a change in meaning of a word and a change in conceptual form is addressed. Although the article comes to the conclusion that hard-and-fast distinctions between words and concepts are extremely difficult to maintain, it nevertheless insists on the benefit of supposing that such distinctions can be held. This enables one to characterize concepts in terms of their functions rather than their meanings, and some examples of these functions are provided. In conclusion, the article returns to the issue of historical approaches to words and concepts and suggests that a conceptual history formulated through the lens of conceptual function complements philological accounts of how words and meanings inform us about the past.
+ CATHERINE CYMONE FOURSHEY, Philology in African Historical Inquiry: Troubling the Meaning of Girlhood in Bantu Speech Communities, History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
Language and history are inextricably entangled with each other, but can one be used to illuminate the other? This article focuses on the generations of philologists and Bantu speakers who have collectively, in different ways, obscured and illuminated our understandings of such categories as gender and childhood. In particular, it challenges the antiquity of girlhood as a historical designation in eastern and central African Bantu speech communities. It addresses questions regarding philology's relevance in studying ancient Bantu speakers’ practices marking gender and generation as characteristics of childhood and identity. Rather than looking to written literature, this article draws on spoken word in a part of Africa where historians have long developed models of historical analysis through philological methods that forefront African intellectual trends over externally imposed ones. The words people develop reflect their ways of thinking about who they are and which categories matter to them. In this article, ancestry and familial generations act as both a subject of and method for reclaiming the past and understanding some of the processes through which identity categories were formed within ancient Bantu speech communities. It concludes by demonstrating that childhood and, specifically, girlhood are not innate and automatic categories that can be easily defined but are historically contingent identities that are forged in particular, identifiable circumstances.
+ EMILY APTER, Planetary Concept-Work: Philology, Untranslatables, Language Justice, History and Theory, Theme Issue 63 (December 2025).
Starting with an example of philological method drawn from Leo Spitzer's essay titled “Linguistics and Literary History” (1948), which, for many years, served as a foundational text of the discipline of comparative literature, this article delineates some of the reasons why philology, especially in its most specialized guises, became an outmoded discipline in contemporary pedagogies of the humanities. A case is made, however, for “philology now” in the form of plurilingual concept-work and translation theory. Crucial to forms of philosophizing across Western and non-Western languages and traditions, recognized as an important fulcrum of global language justice movements, and repurposed in the emergent field of ecotranslation (which enlarges the semiosphere beyond human language even as it prioritizes language survival among humans), philology gains renewed traction in the contemporary translational humanities.