A Comparative Approach to Textual Philology: Germany and China around 1800

Abstract

Approaches equivalent to philology developed in different textual traditions. While Chinese scholarship, especially as it developed since the seventeenth century, has long been described as being similar to European philology, no comparative study of the European and Chinese practices has been undertaken yet. This article compares philological texts from China and Germany written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and shows that there is a significant overlap between the two: in both traditions, one finds challenges to the idea of a recoverable urtext, detailed examinations of the layer structure of received texts, and a focus on lexical analysis. These questions are constitutive of two of the most important traditions of philology, and their emergence can be explained as a reaction to extended histories of textual transmission. This comparative study therefore helps us refine how we characterize philology and builds toward a global research framework.