Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship

"This is a book by Anthony Grafton of Princeton, who is the greatest living scholar of early modern philology. It’s a 2-volume work about Joseph Scaliger who was one of the great late 16th, early 17th century philologists. Like Fraser’s book, it’s the best existing study of a very important moment in the development of philology. Most of the texts that concern philologists — from ancient Alexandria up to the late 16th and 17th centuries — were classical Greek and Roman texts. The study of those texts focused on trying to emend the damage done to texts as they were copied over time, or on understanding what the writers were trying to say. What happened in the late 16th and 17th centuries, for a variety of reasons, is that philologists began to expand enormously the kinds of subjects they were interested in, and the approaches to managing those subjects. “He pioneered the study of chronology, an important early modern discipline, which is the attempt to order historical events in various parts of the world in various civilizations on the same timescale.” Of all of those early modern scholars, Scaliger was perhaps the most diverse and accomplished. He worked not only in classical scholarship, as Grafton’s subtitle suggests, but also in the study of the Bible. He pioneered the study of chronology, an important early modern discipline, which is the attempt to order historical events in various parts of the world in various civilizations on the same timescale — i.e. to put events in China on a par with events in the history of ancient Greece and Rome, or the history of ancient Israel. That work, which sounds very technical and dull, in fact vastly expanded the horizons of Europeans, as they integrated into their understanding of civilization the great civilizations outside of the traditional European sphere of influence. The study of philology became much broader in terms of civilizations, and much more historically-minded in terms of the way scholars approached texts and languages. No it doesn’t, which is why if you or I were going to school now, we would probably not be studying Latin and Greek, unless we were attending a German gymnasium. Those languages were the center of education principally because the education on which western schooling was built was the education established in the ancient Greek-speaking world. It was then picked up by the Romans and transmitted into the Middle Ages and reinvigorated during the Renaissance. It centered on the study of Greek and Latin because of the way early philologists had created grammar as a very broad-gauged study of languages, literature and, to some extent, history. “Precisely because Greek and Latin were arcane and difficult subjects, a certain amount of prestige attached to them.” It’s because of that historical contingency that the study of those languages remained crucial to education, down through the 19th century and into the 20th century, in some places. Precisely because Greek and Latin were arcane and difficult subjects, a certain amount of prestige attached to them. Schooling became a way to separate the elite from the non-elite, and especially elite males, because women were not taught Greek and Latin until the very late 19th century. Grammar was very closely associated with Latin and Greek and especially Latin. The grammar that we now apply to English and other vernacular languages was essentially developed out of Latin grammar. That’s why we have this awkward fit between English grammar and the way people actually speak. The categories are all categories developed for the study of Latin."