THE WIND THAT MELTS THE ICE

REFLECTIONS ON THE SCALE OF PHILOLOGY

David B. Lurie

History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025)
“Philology Now” Theme Issue

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).