Warring States Project
Philology
Documents are useless as sources for history until they can be read. If the script is unknown, it must be deciphered. If the language is more ancient than the one we know, it must be reconstructed. If there are hard words, they must must be explained. Corruptions in the text must be corrected, interpolations must be identified, and forgeries must be labeled, so that they can be understood against the time when they were written, and not used as sources for the time they purport to describe. If there are areas of difference within the text, whether they arise from a hands of several simultaneous authors in a collaborative text, or from the contributions of successive proprietors to an accretional text, those areas must be located, and their directionality must be determined, and their proper chronological positions must be assigned. The resulting chronology must then be examined for consistency as a system, and the historical implications of that system must be found to be humanly plausible.
Only then can the historian step in, to read history from the texts and to 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.
Some parts of the above definition of philology are old, but three points 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 in so doing may 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 to be multiplied for a larger public. Any such first growth must be identified before we know what it is that text criticism is endeavoring to recover.
- DIRECTIONALITY. The key to all evaluations of manuscript variants, and also to all adjudications of parallel passages in 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 for text criticism in 1849; it is here extended to everything else that comes under the eye of the philologist.
- SPURIA. In the past, the usual practice, with a passage identified as an interpolation, or a work revealed as a forgery, or indeed with anything as not by its previously supposed author, has been to reject it as unworthy of further attention. This is wrong. The text critic should not discard, merely because they are inconsistent, paragraphs which represent the author's maturer thoughts, or the late layers of some accretional school text which, however much they may depart in style from the early layers, are still part of the history of that school. And the historian should not ignore evidence merely because it is not evidence for the period of immediate interest. Everything is evidence for history; it merely needs to be assigned to its proper place in history. Civilizations make up nice legends about their founding fathers; they even invent founding fathers. These, if you like, are lies about the past. But the lies are also truths about the mind of the time in which they were told: they express a need of the time; they are a response of that time to that need. The historian can no more ignore forged texts or false legends, merely because they are not true, than the psychologist can ignore dreams, merely because they are dreams. Dreams and legends express something inward, something important, about the persons or periods where they occur.
New or old, the basic techniques of philology are what they have always been. They come down to the detection of differences, the establishing of directionality, and ultimately to the assembling of a chronology which incorporates its constituents without inconstency, and which attests a historical development which in itself is humanly plausible.
Doing this in practical instances can be a difficult business, requiring not only sound judgement but colossal erudition. Is it worth the trouble, to the philologists themselves or to anybody else? The question is inevitable, and Charles-Victor Langlois answered it 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 goes 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, extended as we here propose, might proceed in dealing with a problematic text.
- Preliminary
- Contents (The "hub" of this section)
- The Strictures of A E Housman (Required Reading)
- Acquaintance
- Outline of Procedure
- Growth
- Corruption
- Placement: Location, Date, and Authorship
- Retrospect
- Apparatus
Now we turn more particularly to the numerate side of Philology:
17 Jan 2004 / Contact The Project / Exit to Home Page
