17 Dec A renaissance for Lady Philology? Or at least for her narrative heritage…
“Philology brings out the worse in people”, we used to say when I was a doctoral student in the 1990s. It was an internal joke, probably a paraphrase of Eugène Ionesco’s La Leçon from 1950, “l’arithmétique mène à la philologie et la philologie mène au pire.” We weren’t familiar with Ionesco, but had heard this cited by a guest lecturer and found it funny. In our mind, this saying was about everything we disliked about the department: the curious characters who never seemed to have left their dusty offices, the passive-aggressive tone at seminars and in the lunch room, the outdated teaching material where women appeared only if they were silent.
I left that department behind after I finished my thesis, but I remained marked by that first impression. As a young scholar, I never thought of myself as a philologist – I was a language person, a literary scholar, interested in texts and their culture, a narratologist… It wasn’t until I became Professor of Ancient and Byzantine Greek at an old university such as Uppsala that I decided to embrace rather than reject philology as at least one of my academic identities. Based on the approach of my former supervisor and mentor Tomas Hägg, I decided that philology could be a kind of discipline totale: encompassing everything that is related to language in both material and abstract ways. A philologist is someone who can look at details, but also zoom out in order to grasp the bigger picture.
In many ways it was already there, under the dusty surface, also in my student days. The layering of the Greek tradition in its material, linguistic, and literary form, the successive cultural and religious understandings of basically the same material, the continuations and rewritings and adaptations… The Byzantines knew this and my colleague Eric Cullhed frames it so well in his essay about the Anacharsis or Ananias, an anonymous Lucianic dialogue written in twelfth-century Constantinople:
A scholar bearing the nom de guerre Aristagoras encounters the allegorical personification Lady Grammar and complains about the countless woes that he has suffered in the hands of the aristocrat “Anacharsis.” Grammatikê is not the nasty flagellator of the Western allegorical imagination, nor an ancillary muse whom philosophy banishes, but a loving and empowering nurse. She is the solid foundation without which all other branches of knowledge would collapse. She is Grammar according to Dionysius Thrax’ definition and Byzantine school practice: “the empeiria of Ancient poetry and prose that renders the tongue Hellenic, rich in stories, regulated by meter and correct in pronunciation” (Anacharsis 44–48). Aristagoras is aristos on the agora, the best public speaker, and his nurse stands for the craft of understanding and imitating the ancient classics, not only their linguistic and formal aspects, but also the mythical and historical universes from which they are inseparable.
I have frequently pulled out this passage when I want to explain the importance of language, grammar and, especially, philology – ‘the solid foundation without which all other branches of knowledge would collapse’. It may seem exaggerated, but I think that most would agree that language is central to human thinking and therefore indispensable for any academic pursuit, including the so-called hard sciences.
What’s interesting is that philology seems to be experiencing a kind of renaissance right now, at least in terms of external funding. Our own Retracing Connections is of course an example of this, and perhaps a case in point when it comes to the great advantages of philology as a discipline that can combine all kinds of perspectives. We combine the study of languages with the study of manuscripts and the study of storytelling. We’re a large group of scholars from different corners of Europe who look at the way in which stories travel across languages and cultures in the Byzantine world. Together we trace connections that we would not be able to see without each other. With a point of departure in the central core of philology, with all that comes with it in the form of palaeography, book history, comparative linguistics, literary analysis, we can move on and collaborate with other fields of competence: history, religion, translation studies, computational linguistics – you name it.
It was that kind of experience that also inspired DigPhil, the Swedish Graduate School of Digital Philology, which is funded by the Swedish Research Council and hosted by the Faculty of Languages at Uppsala University. The aim of DigPhil is to educate a new generation of philologists, grounded in the history of their respective language discipline but also possessing a strong proficiency in language technology. My point here is not to brag about Uppsala’s success in landing external funding, but to bring your attention to what I believe is a trend: a new interest in, or perhaps rather a new understanding of the value of philology. And I believe that this can be connected to two aspects of philology in particular.
First, the inclusive and collaborative feature that has been part of philological endeavours from the beginning. It is true that philology often has been associated with close reading and careful study of details, but it has always relied also on the zooming out mentioned above, which in turn has led to interdisciplinary collaborations. In the past, such collaborations were most often with archaeology and history of religion; now they have been extended to biology and digital humanities. This means that philologists know how to put together successful collaborative groups – it’s not something we need to learn, it’s how we work. Second, and even more importantly to me personally: philology is both part of and studies a long series of narrative heritages.
I think this is also part of the contemporary interest in what we do. Storytelling, narrative devices, translation practices – all of that is as important as ever, and philologists are the ones who can combine languages skills with both literary perspectives and an understanding of transmission. That goes not just for old narratives preserved in manuscripts, but also for contemporary traditions of storytelling – poems still being sung in south-east Turkey, tales still being told across the world.
It is accordingly not surprising that philological projects are doing so well in the competition for external funding right now. Looking only at my immediate Nordic surrounding, I can think of three perfect examples, all with roots in the fertile ground of the Centre for Medieval Literature at Odense University, 2012-22: Aglae Pizzone’s MSCA Doctoral Network AntCom, “From Antiquity to Community: Rethinking Classical Heritage through Citizen Humanities”, the Nordic CODICUM project that just received an ERC Synergy Grant to use modern techniques to study medieval manuscript material, with Lars Boje Mortensen as one of the PI:s, and our own Christian Høgel’s forthcoming project funded by the Swedish Research Council, “Metaphrasis and Gender: The Fluid Lives of Female Saints in Greek Menologia”. Christian, now at Lund University, is also part of the MSCA Doctoral Network StoryPharm, which examines Greco-Roman, Persian, Byzantine, Arabic and Western medieval approaches to physical and mental illness, as well as the therapeutic role of narrative. And last but not least, our Retracing Connections colleagues Marijana Vukovic and Sandro Nikolaishvili have a grant from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung for the philological endeavor “Retrieving a Forgotten Byzantine Hagiography Collection from Georgian: John Xiphilinos’ Saints’ Lives”.
In light of all this, it was perhaps no surprise that the second Biennial Conference of the World Philology Union (WPU) was organized at Uppsala University under the title “Philology and the Narrative Heritage”. WPU and its president Jens Braarvig are concerned with the future of historical languages at universities around the world and call for action in order to safeguard philological competence in as many language areas as possible. And multitude is good, but renewal and openness are even more important. In a new shape, openly embracing both neighbouring and more farfetched disciplines as potential partners, I believe that Lady Philology can become even more relevant. Especially if we see linguistic and formal aspects of languages as inseparable from their mythical and historical universes – their storyworlds.