Warring States Project
Philology
Documents are useless for history until they can be read. The unknown script must be deciphered, the ancient language must be reconstructed, the hard words must be explained. Corruptions in the text must be corrected, interpolations must be identified, forgeries must be labeled. The texts must be dated at least relatively. The resulting chronology must be consistent, and its historical implications must be plausible.
Only then can the historian step in, to read history from the texts and construct a full picture of the period for which they are the primary evidence. To perform this work of preparation, to make the texts fully and safely available to their interpreters, is the special task of philology.
Three details in the above definition of philology are new. They are:
- GROWTH. Text critics have assumed that when they have eliminated scribal corruptions by comparing different manuscripts, what is left is the "author's original." But a work may grow, and produce internal inconsistencies, while it is still under its author's hand or closely held by its originating group, before it is given to copyists and the larger public. This prepublication growth must be recovered, and by definition, it cannot be recovered by comparison of the copyists' manuscripts.
- DIRECTIONALITY. The key to the evaluation of manuscript variants, and also to the adjudication of parallel passages in different different texts, is the principle that the earlier reading is the one from which the others may most reasonably be derived. That principle was enunciated by Tischendorf in 1849; it is here extended to all philological decisions.
- SPURIA. In the past, an interpolated passage or a forged work have been rejected as unworthy of further attention. This is wrong. The critic should not discard the author's second thoughts, or the tradition's later reinventions of itself. They are have their place in history; each part merely needs to be assigned to its proper place in history. Civilizations make up legends about founding fathers; or they invent founding fathers. These are lies about the past, but they are truths about the mind of the time in which they were told. The mind of that time is also part of history.
New techniques or old, the basic ideas of philology are always the same: detecting differences, establishing directionality, and assembling a chronology which is self-consistent and humanly plausible.
Doing this is difficult; it requires erudition and judgement. Is it worth the trouble? The question is inevitable, and Charles-Victor Langlois answered the question perfectly:
There is only one argument for the legitimacy and honorable character of the obscure labors of erudition, but it is a decisive argument: it rests on their indispensability. No erudition, no history.
Or as Langlois went on to add, quoting Saint Jerome:
Non sunt contemnenda quasi parva, sine quibus magna constare non possunt. ("Those things are not to be disparaged as little, without which great things cannot come into being").
This section celebrates some of the achievements of philology in the past, and gives a brief outline of how philology proceeds in dealing with a problematic text.
- Preliminary
- The Strictures of A E Housman (Required Reading)
- Acquaintance
- Outline of Procedure
- Growth
- Corruption
- Placement: Location, Date, and Authorship
Thus far the past, all of it still valid. The philology of the future has added some rather sophisticated tools:
17 Jan 2004 / Contact The Project / Exit to Home Page
