Introduction

“In the beginning was the logos ,” announces the Gospel of John (1:1). But what about the philologos , that lover of words, learning, or reason? Stories compete to tell the origins of philology, and, as ever, such stories can (self-)serve to different ends.

Two of them exert particular power in relating its beginnings, the “philologony.” One points back to antiquity, the “classical” one, and the Library of Alexandria, where figures like Eratosthenes and Callimachus cataloged, curated, and corrected written works, including those of Homer. Another looks to the city of Göttingen in 1777, when a young Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) – the would-be Homeric critic – insisted on matriculating as a studiosus philologiae , expressly not a student of theology, what Salomon Reinach (1858–1932) hailed “philology’s day of birth.” 1 Both stories are highly selective. Long before Alexandrian critics, scholars at the Library of Ashurbanipal created, copied, and commented on cuneiform texts, while matriculants earlier than Wolf had already called themselves students of philology.

2 Yet those selections furnish two frames to conceptualize the history of philology: either general practices bound up with textuality itself – and thus extendable to literary cultures through time and space – or specific formations of knowledge-production, made in Europe and exported, if adapted, elsewhere.