Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Sachphilologie

"If Turner had spent a bit more time with [August] Boeckh, ['who lectured on "Classical Studies" . . . at the University of Berlin from 1809 to 1865,'] he would have been able to use Boeckh's neologistic 'Sachphilologie', or 'a philology of things', to show how philology also stands at the beginning of the very contemporary turn to material culture.
     "This relationship between the verbal and the material is [also] fundamental to the story of philology.  Turner includes archaeology as one of the humanities subjects that grows out of classical philology (and antiquarianism, one of the subjects that flowed in to help make it), but he seems not to grasp how intertwined they are. . . . the twinned relationship between the history in words [emphasized by Turner] and the history in things seems likely to deepen in the near future."

     Peter N. Miller, "Word science," a review of Philology:  the forgotten origins of the modern humanities (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2014), by James Turner, Times literary supplement no. 5843 (March 27, 2015):  27 (26-27).

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