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Ton van Kalmthout and Huib Zuidervaart, eds., The Practice of Philology in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands . Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Pp. 258. €79.00.

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/690590

2379-3171

Theodor Dunkelgrün,

Classical Studies and Philology

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsTon van Kalmthout and Huib Zuidervaart, eds., The Practice of Philology in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Pp. 258. €79.00.Theodor DunkelgrünTheodor Dunkelgrün Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore“Outside of Italy and Greece,” Barthold Georg Niebuhr wrote in his 1811 Römische Geschichte, “the philologist knows no place more sacred than the Senate Hall of Leiden University, where the portraits of the professors, from Scaliger in his purple princely cloak up to Ruhnkenius, are on display.” Niebuhr knew where to look, for both a precedent of his own university, founded by Wilhelm von Humboldt in Berlin the year before, and the pedigree of the methods of historical source criticism that made his Geschichte a ground-breaking study in the history of Roman law.But what of the Dutch themselves? How did the academic disciplines that emerged and professionalized in the Netherlands after the Napoleonic era absorb, transmit, abandon, or transform local traditions and practices of textual scholarship? The collection under review is an attempt—partially successful—to answer these questions.Its deliberate Schwerpunkt lies in the history of scholarship on the languages and literatures of the Low Countries, from Middle Dutch to the modern vernacular and from Frisian to distant, diasporic Afrikaans (West Yiddish goes unmentioned). Most of the eleven chapters trace the institutionalization of a set of subdisciplines within or related to neerlandistiek (the study and teaching of Dutch language and literature), with special focus on the way Dutch studies interlocked with Germanic philology and Indo-European linguistics. Other contributions treat the study of modern European languages at secondary schools and universities, the emergence of a notion of modern (as opposed to classical) philology, and the teaching of Dutch in francophone parts of the Low Countries. Particularly interesting sections deal with the editing of medieval Dutch texts, medieval and modern Dutch lexicography, the unmasking of the Oera Linda book (a forgery of Old Frisian), and the importance of extra-academic cultural institutions, especially the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde (which recently celebrated its 250th anniversary) and the journal De Gids (now in its 180th year).Together, these chapters show that the authority of German scholarship, ideas of Volksgeist and the nation-building demands of the newfound Dutch monarchy fueled and fostered the institutionalization of Dutch philology. There is occasional poignant Whiggishness, however—for example, “the Kingdom (of which Belgium would remain part for some time)” (39).Several chapters show well how overtly nationalist philology went together with intensely comparative forms of scholarship: comparative literature, mythology, linguistics. The intellectual exchange and collaboration that underlay such comparatism—in scholarly journals, learned societies, correspondence, studies abroad—are richly on display throughout, such as Rita Schlusemann’s discussion of the way Jacob Grimm alerted Dutch colleagues to what proved to be an immensely important Middle Dutch manuscript in an obscure German library.Most contributions reflect a “German turn” in Dutch scholarship after years of French rule. Surprisingly, they also illuminate the afterlife of local Enlightenment and Humanist traditions that had helped make the United Provinces central to the Republic of Letters. Jan Noordegraaf shows how German giants of historical-comparative grammar (Schlegel, Bopp, Grimm, von Humboldt) discovered the “Newtonian linguistics” (Reinier Salverda’s term) of Lambert ten Kate (1674–1731) and identifies it as the beginning of a tectonic rupture between “classical philology” and “historical linguistics”: the former a cultural history in a broad and deep sense, the latter modeled on the natural sciences. Jan Rock takes us further back, to Janus Dousa (1545–1604)—visionary university administrator, poet, scholar, and the man most responsible for bringing Joseph Scaliger to Leiden. Dousa owned a manuscript of a Middle Dutch chronicle and arranged for its first edition (Hollandtsche Riim-Kroniik, 1591), which, Rock posits, should be considered “the starting point of Dutch philology” (162). Niebuhr would have nodded knowingly, while grumbling at the wrong date given here for Dousa’s death (1626 instead of 1604).On the whole, the volume follows a familiar narrative in which natural sciences exert increasing pressure on humanistic disciplines. This reader wonders, however, whether the “old philology” set against “new linguistics” was not a straw man. When the Eerste Nederlandsche Philologen-Congres met in Amsterdam in 1898, classical, Germanic, Romance, and Sanskrit philologists gathered alongside comparative linguists, ancient historians, and archaeologists. The proceedings suggest each subdiscipline had its respective and respected place under the philological sun. Moreover, Toon van Hal has brilliantly shown that much early modern Dutch philological scholarship can and should be considered a form of historical comparative linguistics. Only one author in this volume mentions Van Hal’s work (once); a serious reading of it would have required a revision of several ostensible ruptures.Johannes Magliano-Tromp’s contribution also reflects on the legacy of humanism, turning to Abraham Kuenen (1828–92) and his student Gerrit Wildeboer (1855–1911) to explore the ways in which different Dutch Protestants reconceived of the relationship between biblical criticism and protestant theology. “Once again,” Magliano-Tromp writes of these biblicists, “a reform movement took up the Bible as a weapon against traditional theology, but now against the very protestant theology that had given it its exclusive status as a source of authority” (103). Kuenen and Wildeboer commanded international readerships, and this reviewer wished they had been given more space, for besides this brief article the volume contains no discussion of the challenges with which textual criticism posed nineteenth-century Christian culture. Willem Bilderdijk (1756–1831) features as a scholar of Dutch and correspondent of Jacob Grimm but not as the father of the réveil of Dutch Calvinism. We meet Matthijs Siegenbeek, the first professor eloquentiae Hollandicae (1797), but we hear nothing about his gifts as a Mennonite preacher and the possible role of vernacular homiletics or humanist traditions of eloquence in the establishment of this first Dutch chair of Dutch. We learn that the founder of Dutch Romance philology, Barend Sijmons, was the son of a Walloon Pastor but nearly nothing of the way traditions of language and learning were transmitted through generations in the French-Calvinist community that long provided the Netherlands with scholarly families. Tellingly, Bart Leeuwenburgh’s 2009 study of the Dutch reception of Darwin in the nineteenth century, Darwin in domineesland, is mentioned only once, in a footnote (136) and translated dismissively—and erroneously—as “Darwin in the provinces.”Looking up at those Leiden portraits, Niebuhr knew that the old masters considered philology nothing if not a historical discipline. If the professionalization of linguistics was a methodological break with philological tradition, the practice of historical source criticism represents its most significant continuity. Siegenbeek devoted his inaugural lecture to “P. C. Hooft as poet and historian.” The first chair of Dutch history was established in 1860 when Matthias de Vries’s (1820–92) Leiden chair was split into one for Dutch linguistics and one for Dutch history. The first to hold the latter was Robert Fruin (1823–99), and Jo Tollebeek’s outstanding essay, informed by expert use of Fruin’s extensive unpublished Nachlass, both illuminates its subject and exemplifies the philological tradition the volume as a whole seeks to address.As a whole, however, it does not do so. One laments that the volume does not include (admittedly: 10, 13) chapters on the classical and oriental philological traditions for which the Netherlands had long been famous and would be, in new ways, in the nineteenth. Reinhart Dozy’s name pops up once or twice; M. J. de Goeje and Snouck Hurgronje are entirely absent. This might account for the absence of any discussion of the fraught relationship between philological practice and colonial rule; it does not make that relationship any less pertinent to the topic at hand. In his opening remarks to the aforementioned 1898 Conference of Philologists, the classicist Samuel Adrianus Naber (1828–1913) lamented that so many of the most gifted students, whom he would have loved to see “at Olympia, Athens, Epidauros, Mycenae, and Fayum” were instead studying the languages of the Dutch East Indies. The Sanskritist J. H. C. Kern receives four pages, but there is no chapter on Dutch Sanskrit scholarship. As Suzanne Marchand has shown, the interlocking of oriental philology and biblical criticism forms a central chapter in the history of nineteenth-century European culture, one in which several Dutch scholars neglected in this volume were major protagonists.The book’s title led this reader to expect at least one chapter on classical philology. Instead, the editors refer to the work of Wessel Krul. “Classical philology” does recur throughout the volume, as the mother and interlocutor of the new philologies of the nineteenth century. Yet as Anthony Grafton, Joanna Weinberg, and others have shown, early modern humanists like Scaliger and Casaubon would not have recognized an exclusively Greco-Roman “classical” antiquity as intellectually useful or historically sensible. Indeed, that restricted notion of “classics” is an invention of the nineteenth century. Salvatore Settis identifies F. A. Wolf’s Darstellung der Alterthumswissenschaft (1807) as the moment when classical antiquity is defined as exclusively Greco-Roman, “to distinguish it from other antiquities, such as the Egyptian or the Hebraic” (see A. Grafton, G. W. Most, and S. Settis, eds., The Classical Tradition [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010], s.v. “classical”). Throughout this volume, however, “classical philology” is never historicized or questioned. “In the early days of Leiden University (1575),” one reads on the opening page “philology or the critical examination of classical texts was regarded as cutting-edge science.” “During the whole of the Middle Ages there was a significant interest in the classics” (20). “Nineteenth-century philology underwent a major transformation: from being a purely classical discipline it was converted into a national one” (28). Such uncritical and unhistorical use of “classical philology” is one of a number of ways in which this collection displays a disappointing dissonance between subject and method.There is also carelessness about language: “Syrian” (for Syriac, 24) “Gottingen” (29, 71); Latin jus examinandi et promovendi is translated as “the right to deliver university diplomas and have Ph.D. students” (61); German “Romanistik” as “Roman philology” (62); French “l’examen de la langue” as “the exam of language” (132, 141), Dutch “vaderlandsch” as “native” (158). The only line of Greek in the book has six errors and is misattributed (117 n. 8); Grafton is referred to as “the Anglo-Saxon historian” (168), and as the single author of the Scaliger bibliography (1993), a collaboration with Henk Jan de Jonge and Alastair Hamilton. The reader is invited to marvel at the fact that at Leiden “Scaliger was appointed professor almost simultaneously with Jacobus Perizonius” (170, repeated on 172). Marvel he does: Scaliger arrived in Leiden in 1593, Perizonius one hundred years later (the bibliography there omits W. den Boer’s Scaliger en Perizonius [1964]). One illustration (242), a letter by Jacob Grimm, is illegible. Only if one adds 6 to the page number of a given entry does the index become accurate. No native speaker of English seems to have proofread those contributions (six out of eleven) not translated from Dutch. All this is the more lamentable in a collection devoted to philology as “the precise and critical use of sources” (29).The volume joins the strong series History of Science and Scholarship in the Netherlands. Amsterdam University Press is to be commended for embracing a notion of Wissenschaftsgeschichte of which philological traditions and practices are an intrinsic part. It also adds to a flourishing library of recent scholarship on philological traditions and the history of the humanities, though sadly without engaging in that wider conversation. Scholars interested in the historical study of Dutch language and literature and its place in nineteenth-century learned culture will find here much that is both interesting and useful, though that would have been more clearly flagged had the title been The Practices of Dutch Philology in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by History of Humanities Volume 2, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Society for the History of the Humanities Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690590 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.