Philology

The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities

James Turner

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780691168586, 9780691145648
• eBook ISBN: 9781400850150
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: History of Education

A prehistory of today's humanities, from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century

Many today do not recognize the word, but "philology" was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all other studies of language and literature, as well as history, culture, art, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word?

In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university. The humanities today face a crisis of relevance, if not of meaning and purpose. Understanding their common origins—and what they still share—has never been more urgent.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• Conventions
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. From the First Philologists to 1800
• Part II. On the Brink of the Modern Humanities, 1800 to the Mid-Nineteenth Century
• Part III. The Modern Humanities in the Modern University, the Mid-Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index