Lucian’s position as a commentator on religion has been debated intensely since late antiquity: for most of the last two millennia, it has been the main focus for commentators. This is primarily due to Lucian teasing Christians in a couple of places (although in fact they get off relatively lightly); but he is also, and indeed much more insistently, scathing about aspects of Greco-Roman ‘paganism’. This chapter begin by unpicking some of this reception history, and showing how modern scholarly perspectives remain locked into nineteenth-century cultural-historical narratives (which were designed to play ‘Hellenism’ off against ‘Christianity’, in various forms). It then argues that we should set aside the construct of Lucian’s status as a religious ‘outsider’— a legacy of nineteenth-century thinking — and consider Lucian instead as an agent operating within the field of Greek religion, and contributing richly (albeit satirically) to ongoing, vital questions over humans’ relationship with the divine. He should be ranged, that is to say, alongside figures like Aristides, Pausanias, and Apuleius as keen observers of the religious culture of the time.

What is literary data? This chapter addresses this question by examining how the concept of data functioned during a formative moment in academic literary study around the turn of the twentieth century and again at the beginning of electronic literary computing. The chapter considers the following cases: Lucius Adelno Sherman’s Analytics of Literature (1893), the activities of the Concordance Society (c.1906–28), Lane Cooper’s A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth (1911), and the work of Stephen M. Parrish c.1960. The chapter explains how the concept of literary data was used by literature scholars to signal a commitment to a certain epistemological framework that was opposed to other ways of knowing and reading in the disciplinary field.

What is a book, really? In tracing the passage of a single work from the alleys of Lahore to online retail and the author’s bookshelf, this chapter argues against idealism. In transmission, ideational content sediments within specific material contexts. In this way, ideas become objects. Consequently, the same idea can take shape by drastically different forms, affecting the practice of interpretation. The affordances of the object – what can be done with it, how, and where – affect our practices of interpretation.

This essay explores the role of the dictionary in religious history, specifically as a conduit of social and intellectual authority brought to bear in religious interpretation, sitting both upstream and downstream of the broader flow of history, culture, and forms of knowledge. Of particular interest is the history of three categories of reference works: the bilingual dictionary (or lexicon) focused on ancient biblical languages; the Bible dictionary, focused on biblical realia, geography, and similar topics; and the theological dictionary, focused on significant biblical ideas associated with particular words or the ancient speakers. The categories are situated historically in the development of biblical scholarship and philology in the West, from the pre-modern era through the contemporary and digital context. Two case studies demonstrate the intersection between dictionaries, biblical interpretation, and cultural ideologies: use of Bible dictionaries and lexicons in the antebellum period as a tool for attacking or defending slavery on biblical grounds in the American South; and the influence on theological dictionaries in the early twentieth century from the anti-Semitic context of Nazi Germany.

The terms linguistics and philology refer to different but overlapping areas of the Humanities. An opposition between them does not predate the triumph of structuralism. Structuralist linguistics devoted itself mainly to synchrony and theory, with lexicology and lexicography ending up in no-man’s land. A detailed look at dictionary definitions of linguistics and philology for more than three centuries offers a picture of the goals of both disciplines and of the ways the public understood language studies. Before the twentieth century, the focus of philology was the interpretation of old texts and word origins. The treatment of special terminology (including the terminology of linguistics) in dictionaries shows that despite all the differences a clear line between linguistics and philology cannot and need not be drawn, just as such a line cannot always be drawn between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. In the context of the present study, the use of etymology and phonetic transcription in various dictionaries illuminates the difference between and the unity of philology and linguistics.

A retrospective look at the 1980 Dumbarton Oaks Symposium “Beyond Byzantium” noting its groundbreaking aspects, omissions, and the evolution of the field in subsequent years. A particular emphasis is the increasing breadth of topics in the study of the Byzantine Near East as scholarly interest has moved beyond primarily philological and religious topics. The community of scholars interested in these traditions has also changed. At the 1980 Symposium several presenters were clergy who came to the field via the study of biblical languages. Few were women. Today the field is much more diverse, with many active scholars who belong to Near Eastern Christian communities. Manuscripts are used to illustrate cultural exchanges among Eastern Christian traditions and to highlight issues of ownership and removal of cultural heritage from its original context. A particular emphasis is placed on liturgical manuscripts as a source of information about language acquisition.

The Oxford English Dictionary is the focus of this chapter, which combines an examination of the printed dictionary with an exploration of the draft materials that went into making it. From 1884 to the appearance of its first Supplement in 1933, the OED’s documentation of same-sex lexis far outstripped that of any earlier dictionary. Yet the editors’ commitment to objectivity did not prevent them from reproducing many of the traditional biases of their precursors. At the same time, the rise of sexology in Britain led to the emergence of new taxonomies of erotic desire, ushering into public discourse terms such as homosexuality, bisexuality, inversion, and uranism. While much of the scientific literature cast same-sex attraction as a psychological disturbance, other discourses soon emerged in the writing of apologists and activists who rejected pathologization, whether by reclaiming taxonomic terms, coining new, affirmative identity labels, or refusing to be classified altogether. The chapter inspects how the OED’s compilers grappled with representing these dominant and dissident usages, pulled as they were between the demands of scientific principles and social scruples.

Richard Wagner’s musical and prose works are shot through with ideas, imagery, and speculation relating to race. Given the influence of racial theorising on almost every area of nineteenth-century European thought and culture, this is hardly surprising. Yet Wagner did not just absorb theories of race: he actively disseminated them, a fact that remains a troubling, if unavoidable part of his legacy. This chapter provides a selective overview of the history of scientific racism in Europe (especially Germany) from the Enlightenment era to the early twentieth century, focusing on the intersections of racial theory with aesthetics, comparative philology, and religious ideologies, including antisemitism. Special attention is devoted to Arthur de Gobineau’s influence on Wagner’s late essays, and the impact of those writings on the Bayreuth Circle, including Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

My wager in this book is that the modern idea of the literary as a sovereign order of textuality since the late eighteenth century – autonomous, autotelic, and singular – was coproduced with an extraordinary model of colonial sovereignty in the far-flung colony of British India. I track the proliferation of this model of the literary sovereign then through the conceptual grid of Weltliteratur or world literature and show how this colonial history made its mark across literary cultures in Europe. From the eighteenth century onward, this colonial history shaped and reshaped literary cultures on a global scale, and laid the foundations of what can be defined as the modern culture of letters.

While regularly recognized as a statesman, an educational reformer, the founder of the University of Berlin, and a scholar in political science, philosophy, and literature, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) has not always received as much acknowledgment for his contributions in anthropology or linguistics. When he is paid homage as a student of languages, it is for his role as a philosopher of language rather than as a philologist or linguist. When on other occasions Western academia has remembered Humboldt as a distinct linguist, he has appeared as a scholar of almost all languages except those of Africa or the Americas – and yet it is the very languages of the Western Hemisphere to which Humboldt paid his longest and most intensive attention, as evident by a set of recent publications in German. Chapter 1 offers an introductory discussion for an anglophone audience interested in Humboldt’s contributions to Americanist linguistics.

In response to frequent misconceptions about Humboldt as a linguist, Chapter 2 provides the reader with a review of historiographic research options on the lives of Wilhelm von Humboldt and his younger brother Alexander as Americanist scholars, drawing on three distinct but compatible methodological and conceptual resources: (1) biography as a form of history or the historical ethnography of individual lives; (2) ethnohistory or historical ethnography of a community as a comprehensive, anthropologically conceived social history; and (3) philology as a historical-linguistic method for the analysis of early linguistic attestations, including their systematic reconstruction by triangulation with contemporaneous or modern data for closely related dialects or languages (“reconstitution”).

Moving between an analysis of the canon as a critical mechanism and a focus on the physical limits and definition of Latin literature, the chapter reviews the very discourse of the canon and its impact on the field. The ‘canonised’ nature of Classics determines not just a hierarchy of texts and methodologies worthier of being taught and researched but also informs the very approach to non-canonical or ‘para-canonical’ texts. Any canon, in other words, is not just about what we study, it is also about how we study it. Opening up the canon is a dynamic and self-reinforcing process and one which involves both readers who embody difference (social, racial, gender etc.) accessing and studying an expanded and evolving canon, and texts that embody difference (peripheral, post-classical, marginal etc.) being ‘read into’ the canon by an increasingly diverse readership. Interrogating our canon of Latin literature, this chapter argues, implies a fundamental repositioning of one’s scholarly stance not just towards non-canonical texts but also towards canonical authors.

Chapter Eleven presents Romanticism as a nationalist phenomenon. After defining Romantic nationalism, it reviews three intersecting phenomena central not only to European Romanticism but also to nationalism: the linguistic revolution, the spread of idealism, and the rise of historicist dialectics. In each case, the author shows how these Romantic principles spread transnationally across various media, influencing political thought and emerging nationalisms. The wide-ranging chapter addresses France’s revolutionary nationalism, recuperated under the Restoration, and even more importantly the German nationalism that arose in reaction to French hegemony, but also touches on other Northern, Central and Eastern-European nations that have so far received little coverage in the volume, including, among others, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania. Its looks at the influence of philology on folklore, and on other literary genres such as the national epic, the patriotic hymn, and the historical novel, as well as the other arts, including music, architecture, and painting. Leerssen argues that Jacob Grimm and his teacher, the legal scholar Carl von Savigny, played central roles in the development of Romantic nationalism and of the notion of Volksgeist.

The section’s closing chapter discusses the polemic between Classics and Romantics, which, despite local differences and its lack of traction in Britain, helped crystallise Romanticism in many countries both as a national and as a pan-European cultural phenomenon. Beginning with contradictory statements by Stendhal and Goethe, it argues that the Classic-Romantic nexus not only contributed to the meaning of ‘romantic’ but also of ‘classic’. The first did not replace the other, but instead complexified it by re-appropriating texts from antiquity. The chapter first shows how eighteenth-century philology informed discussions of modern culture in critical texts by F. Schlegel and Schiller, and in A.W. Schlegel’s lectures. These in turn informed Staël’s influential statements in De l’Allemagne and in her letter on translation, which fired up Romanticism in Italy, as well as Stendhal’s ‘Racine et Shakespeare’, which did the same in France. The author touches on the ideological role of translation, but also of Romantic philology and of philhellenism, showing how the Romantics in Germany, France, Britain, Spain, Poland, and Russia re-appropriated the classics. The chapter concludes with a more detailed discussion of Hölderlin’s Hyperion to show Romanticism’s reluctance to differentiate the classic from the modern.

In 1882, the eldest sons of the Prince of Wales visited Palestine and Syria as they neared the end of a voyage around the globe. This chapter uses the written record of their journey on board HMS Bacchante to argue that it signalled important changes in the religious profile of the British monarchy. John Neale Dalton, the tutor to the princes, misrepresented his unintellectual pupils as keen students of the religions of the world in his voluminous two-volume journal of their tour. As British monarchs now headed an empire which its admirers argued was unprecedented in its extent, they prepared to rule it by travelling to encounter the many religions of their future subjects. Dalton’s princes journeyed through time as well as space, capitalising on British power and their royal standing to meet philologists and archaeologists who explained to them the ancient faiths of Japan, China and Egypt. In this global context, their visit to the Holy Land was no longer just a pilgrimage to the origins of Christianity and of elite culture, but a journey of discovery which connected the biblical to other, hitherto alien pasts.

This chapter sketches the history of philology and charts its use as a method for analyzing and understanding orthographic variation. Its chronological arrangement spans the discipline’s development, from the roots of philology in the Classical period to present-day incarnations of the approach. Such incarnations have seen philology move from its use as a tool which sought to make sense of orthographic variation in order to facilitate textual editing, to one which, combined with newer theoretical linguistic approaches, gave rise to disciplines such as historical sociolinguistics or pragmaphilology, where extralinguistic contexts are brought to bear on linguistic data. The authors present two case studies exemplifying contemporary philological approaches to historical orthography. The first one uses a manuscript-centered methodology to illustrate the contrasting copying-practices of two scribes working on the Tanner version of the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica. The second one focuses on the scripting of /w/ in Old English and Old High German and demonstrates how an etymological sound reference system can be employed for graphemic analysis.