HISTORY AND THEORY AND PHILOLOGY NOW

TOGETHER IN THEORY

Nancy Partner

History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2024)
“Philology Now” Theme Issue

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.