Reflections on (New) Philology

Abstract

As the following remarks are to reflect my own scholarly commitment and experience, I should begin by saying that they come from a medievalist who in his work is always conscious of dealing with the works of a past state of civilization. They also come from a historian of literature, who in contrast to political or economic historians makes written documents the subject of his study, and who in contrast to linguists looks at them as works of verbal art. And finally, they come from a professor of English literature who works closely with colleagues whose ultimate aim is the aesthetic analysis and appraisal of verbal objects, and of whom many today feel driven to ask deeper theoretical questions about, not only the nature of aesthetic values, but the nature of language itself and its function to communicate about the relation between object and perceiver, about the psychological or political function of literature and of language, and so on. Working in such an environment naturally brings with it a certain amount of confrontation, which in turn has its occasional political side in discussions about such practical matters as departmental curricula and new appointments. Though I would not rank myself among philologists who have little use for literary criticism and theory, I can of course not help being conscious of pressures and of attitudes on the other side however unvoiced they may remain that would reject philology. Hence, my remarks will reflect a practitioner's concern with what is and with what continuing value for the study of medieval literature it has. They will describe a position and are in no way intended as a Forschungsbericht; the few illustrations cited are no more than examples that have crossed my attention in recent months. By tradition, philology can be taken in either a narrow or a broad sense. In the former it designates the academic discipline of studying or scientifically elucidating the basic, literal meaning of verbal documents. Originally, and primarily, this meant the study of older stages of particular languages, whose records, in contrast to contemporary utterances, required careful investigation and the application of a wide-ranging knowledge in order to make sense. Thus, dealt first with the classical languages, Greek and Latin, and with surviving documents of other dead languages, such as ancient Hebrew and other Near Eastern languages, and eventually the various branches of the Indo-European family. In a short time, philologists extended their studies to the older stages of modern European languages, of their national tongues, as well. To uncover their meaning, it was necessary to understand a variety of ancient writing systems and the phonetic value of individual symbols, whether these have continued in use or not. Once the hypothetical sounds hidden behind written signs had been identified, one could set out to deal with words and sentences and their meanings and