Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern

2. Friedrich Nietzsche: “The eighth of April, 1777, when F. A. Wolf invented for himself the name of stud. philol., is the birthday of philology” (Wir Philologen 3[2], trans. William Arrowsmith, in William Arrowsmith, “Nietzsche: Notes for ‘We Philologists,’” Arion, n.s. 1/2 [1973/1974]: 281). On Wolf’s matriculation at Göttingen as “Philologia Studiosus,” see Mark Pattison, “F. A. Wolf,” in Essays by the Late Mark Pattison, ed. Henry Nettleship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1889), 1:343. But see, too, the discussion in E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 98 n. 1, who notes that, in fact, Wolf “had predecessors as far back as 1736” for his choice of philological study. On Wolf and his milieu—the history of classical philology in eighteenth-century German universities, the relationship between Homeric scholarship and Romanticism, the beginnings of scholarly professionalism in Europe—see the introduction and bibliographical essays in F. A. Wolf: Prolegomena to Homer, 1795, trans., intro., and ann. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 3–36, 249–54.

3. Gregory Nagy, “Death of a Schoolboy: The Early Greek Beginning of a Crisis in Philology,” in On Philology, ed. Jan Ziolkowski (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 37–48.

4. Roberta Frank, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Philologist,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100 (1997): 487, citing Bacon, Novum Organum (London: Reeves, 1879), 2:505.

5. Friedrich Schlegel, “On the Language and Custom of the Indians,” quoted in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 280.

6. William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language (New York: Appleton, 1875), p. 315.

7. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course de linguistique générale, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, rev. Tullio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1982); idemCourse in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983). The opening chapter is “A Brief Survey of the History of Linguistics” (Course in General Linguistics, pp. 1–5; “Coup d’oeil sur l’histoire de la linguistique,” Course de linguistique générale, pp. 13–19). For the story of the making of the Course and its relationship to Saussure’s lectures, see Roy Harris, Reading Saussure: A Critical Commentary on the Cours de linguistique générale (London: Duckworth, 1987); and Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

8. Harris, Reading Saussure, p. 5.

9. The heart of the discussion is Gorgias, 462–63. I use the translation of Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), where the discussion appears on pp. 42–44. A convenient guide to the argument and subsequent bibliography is George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 35–39. See, too, Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 8–11; and, for a characteristically wide-ranging and idiosyncratic account of the Platonic tradition generally, Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

10. Kennedy, New History, p. 3.

11. Carole Blair, “Contested Histories of Rhetoric: The Politics of Preservation, Progress, and Change,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 403. For an extended argument about the need for the discipline of rhetoric to historicize itself, see James L. Kastely, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

12. John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (Cambridge, Mass.: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1810; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 1:12. For Cicero, see De Inventione, ed. and trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), I.i.2, pp. 4–5.

13. See Karl Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969); D. M. Boje, “The Storytelling Organization,” Administrative Science Quarterly 36 (1991): 106–26; Charlotte Linde, Life Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, notes for the unfinished book Wir Philologen, published as Nachgelassene Fragmente, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), vol. 8, 5[187]. The English translation of this material is available in William Arrowsmith, “Nietzsche: Notes for ‘We Philologists,’” Arion, n.s. 1/2 (1973/1974): 279–380, with each fragment keyed to the number in the Colli and Montinari edition. Further references to these notes from Wir Philologen will be cited by number in the edition of Colli and Montinari and the translation of Arrowsmith.

15. See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

16. Pseudo-Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 3.22.35, pp. 218–19.

17. Paul de Man, “The Return to Philology,” Times Literary Supplement, December 10, 1982, pp. 1355–56, reprinted in idem, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 21–26. For de Man’s concerns with rhetorical reading and his investment in the history of Western rhetoric, see idem, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); and Kastely, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition, pp. 195–220.

18. De Man, “Return to Philology,” in Resistance to Theory, p. 23.

19. René Wellek, “Memories of the Profession,” in Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the History of Comparative Literature in the United States, ed. Lionel Gossman and Mihai Spariosu (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 1–11.

20. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 525.

21. See Neal Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 48–55. I have discussed the idea and the etymology of “method” in detail in my Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the Consolation of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

22. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 1; idem, Course de linguistique générale, p. 13.

23. “From a methodological point of view, however, it is of some interest to be acquainted with these errors [erreurs]. The mistakes [les fautes] a science makes in its initial stages present a magnified picture of the mistakes made by individuals starting out on scientific research” (p. 4; pp. 17–18).

24. “Der Lese- und Schreiblehrer und der Corrector sind die ersten Typen des Philologen” (5[189]).

25. For discussion of the genesis and reception of Wir Philologen, see William Arrowsmith, “Nietzsche on Classics and Classicists (Part II),” Arion 2 (1963): 5–27.

26. Arrowsmith, “Nietzsche on Classics and Classicists,” p. 8.

1. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), chap. 2, pp. 74–114.

2. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 217–51.

3. Tyndale had an English translation printed in Cologne, probably in the summer of 1525, but printing was stopped midway through the book. All that has survived from this aborted print run is one copy of the translation of chapter 22 of the Book of Matthew (now in the British Library). The entire New Testament in English was eventually printed in early 1526, at Worms. Only two copies survive, and only one (the Bristol Baptist College copy, now held in the British Library), is complete. Tyndale’s Pentateuch was printed in Amsterdam in 1530, and a revised version of the New Testament appeared in 1534. See David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 109–11, 134–51, and 283–315.

4. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 97, 95, and 99.

5. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

6. See Anthony Grafton, “The Importance of Being Printed,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (1980): 265–86; Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

7. See Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, L’apparition du livre (Paris: Albin-Michel, 1958); Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, eds., Histoire de l’édition française, 4 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1982); Roger Chartier, ed., L’usage de l’imprimé (Paris: Fayard, 1987), published in English as The Culture of Print, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). American scholars associated with this movement include Natalie Davis (see, esp., her Society and Politics in Early Modern France [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975], and Fiction in the Archives [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987]); Robert Darnton (see, esp., The Literary Underground of the Old Regime [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982]); and Paul Saenger (see, esp., Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999]).

8. Johns, The Nature of the Book, p. 5.

9. Warner, Letters of the Republic, p. 7.

10. For English typefaces and manuscript models, see my discussion in Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 160 and 270 n. 31. For the influence of humanist scripts on the development of italic type by Aldus Manutius and his contemporaries, see Nicolas Barker, “The Aldine Italic,” in A Millennium of the Book, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 1994), pp. 45–60.

11. Several recent studies of humanist bookmaking inform my account here: John F. D’Amico, Theory and Practice in Renaissance Textual Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Paolo Trovato, Con ogni diligenza correto: La stampa e le revisioni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani (1470–1570) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991); Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); David Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Lisa Jardine, Erasmus: Man of Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For some reflections on the culture of correction in the period immediately after the one I survey here, see Andrew Murphy, “‘Came errour here by myss of man’: Editing and the Metaphysics of Presence,” Yearbook of English Studies 29 (1999): 118–37.

12. See Hans Widmann, “Die Lektüre unendlichen Korrekturen,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 5 (1964): 778–826.

13. Epigrams of Martial that address directly the relationship of author to scribe, the problems of error, and the control of correct texts include 1.101, 2.6, 2.8, 4.10, 7.11.

14. See Cassiodorus Senator: An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, trans. L. W. Jones (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946).

15. See Karlheinz Hilbert, Baldricus Burgulianus Carmina (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979), poems numbered 9, 10, 84, 85, 92, 105, 108, 144, 148, 196.

16. See Petrarch: Four Dialogues for Scholars, ed. and trans. C. H. Rawski (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1967), pp. 34–37.

17. Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 650.

18. See R. B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927); Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), esp. pp. 42, 46–47 n. 6; Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), esp. p. 354. For more specific accounts, see Joseph A. Dane, “‘On Correctness’: A Note on Some Press Variants in Thynne’s 1532 Edition of Chaucer,” The Library, 6th ser., 17 (1995): 156–67; and Joseph A. Dane and Seth Lerer, “Press Variants in John Stow’s Chaucer (1561) and the Text of ‘Adam Scriveyn,’” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 11 (1999): 468–79.

19. Elizabeth Eisenstein offers a few brief remarks on the origin and impact of the errata sheet in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, pp. 80–81, 85. Elsewhere, she credits the Venetian printer Erhard Ratdolt with the “innovation” of the “first list of errata” (pp. 587–88), but I can find no evidence to support this claim.

20. Noted in Gabriele Paolo Carosi, Da Magonza a Subiaco: L’introduzione della stampa in Italia (n.p.: Bramante, 1982), p. 30; see, too, Trovato, Con ogni diligenza, pp. 87–88.

21. Richardson, Print Culture, p. 45.

22. See Trovato, Con ogni diligenza, pp. 86–93.

23. Horace, Opera (Florence: Antonius Miscominus, 1482), pp. 265v–266r in the modern pagination (Huntington Library Copy).

24. “Siqui uel desint / uel perperam notati sint in grecis dictionibus accentus: eos eruditi uel restituant / uel emendent pro iudico. Siqua etiam preter hec mendosa lector inuenies / que propera[n]tes oculos nostros subterfugerint / ea quo[que] [pro] tuo iudicio eme[n]dabis; nec [quodcunque] putabis nostrum quod parum sit rectum: Errata aut[em] omnia uel impressoribus adscribes / uel curatoribus: Na[m] si mea esse hic errata ulla credes: tunc ego te credam cordis habere nihil” (Politian, Miscellanea [Florence: Antonius Miscominus, 1489], Huntington Library copy). On Politian’s scholarship generally, see the chapter “The Scholarship of Poliziano and Its Context,” in Grafton, Defenders of the Text, pp. 47–75; the comments in D’Amico, Textual Criticism in the Renaissance, pp. 23–27; and, for more specifics, see Joseph Dane, “‘Si vis archetypas habere nugas’: Authorial Subscriptions in the Houghton Library and Huntington Library Copies of Politian, Miscellanea (Florence: Miscomini, 1489),” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s., 10 (1999): 12–22.

25. See Trovato, Con ogni diligenza.

26. For Caxton’s remarks, see Canterbury Tales prologue and Eneydos prologue, in The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. J. B. Crotch, Early English Text Society, Original Series, 176 (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), pp. 91 and 109, respectively. For the word “oversee” as specifically meaning proof correcting, see Percy Simpson, Proofreading in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 1–3.

27. John Constable, Epigrammata (London: Bercula [Berthelett], 1520), sig. d4. My attention was drawn to this publication by John M. Headley, ed., Responsio ad Lutherum, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 5, part 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 836 n. 3.

28. Quoted in Simpson, Proofreading, pp. 46–47. Pynson apparently had a paid corrector at the press as early as 1499, as indicated in a petition (dated 1506) apparently referring to the 1499 publication of the Abbreuiamentum statutorum (see p. 111).

29. Headley, Responsio ad Lutherum, pp. 832–41, where the complex history of the printing of this text is detailed. The work was first published in early 1523, but it was seen as defective; More apparently reworked the text in response to new publications by Luther. A second issue appeared from Pynson probably in December 1523 (according to Headley, the first issue is not in A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1475–1640 [hereafter STC], 2d ed., ed. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine Pantzer, 3 vols. [London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–1991]; the second is, however). Headley presents evidence and arguments that the errata list it contains was compiled by More himself.

30. See Clarence H. Miller, “The Texts,” in Frank Manly, ed., Letter to Bugenhagen, Supplication of Souls, Letter Against Frith, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 7 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. clxi–clxviii. These editions are undated but are datable on external evidence to before October 1525 (p. clxi).

31. J. B. Trapp, ed., The Apology, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 9 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. lxxxix–xci.

32. Miller, Supplication, pp. clxiv, clxvi.

33. Thomas M. Lawler, ed., A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 6, part 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 548–87.

34. See Simpson, Proofreading, pp. 3–4; and Lawler, Dialogue.

35. See the discussion in Lawler, Dialogue, pp. 556 ff.

36. Fisher’s sermon against Luther, delivered at St. Paul’s, February 11, 1526, quoted and discussed in Lawler, Dialogue, p. 440.

37. More’s attention to the multiple reviews of his text may also resonate with the claims of European printers’ colophons that touted the high quality of the proofreaders (or correctors of the press) they employed.

38. Louis A. Schuster, ed., The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 8, part 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 8:36.

39. Translated and quoted in Headley, Responsio, p. 837.

40. From the printer’s advertisement for the 1576 edition of Gascoigne’s The Droome of Doomes Day, reproduced in Simpson, Proofreading, p. 9; see pp. 3–45.

41. Among the vast collection of researches on Tyndale and his Bible, the endpoints may be marked by Edward Arber, The First Printed English New Testament (London: Constable, 1871; reprint, London: Constable, 1895), and David Daniell, whose researches have been summarized in William Tyndale: A Biography (which also contains a full bibliography on the subject). For a collection of primary documents relating to the making and reception of the English Bible generally and Tyndale’s version in particular, see Alfred W. Pollard, Records of the English Bible (London: Oxford University Press, 1911).

42. My study of the 1526 New Testament is based on the facsimile of the unique, complete edition (Banbury: Henry Stone and Son, 1976), with an afterword by F. F. Bruce, though unfortunately, as the afterword states, “any marginalia added by readers have been removed” in the photographic reproduction.

43. Daniell mentions them without comment (William Tyndale, p. 146). Many other misprints and distinctive wordings in the 1526 New Testament have been recorded and compared with the revised 1534 edition (and its misprints) in N. Hardy Wallis, ed., The New Testament Translated by William Tyndale, 1534 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), pp. 613–28.

44. See Trovato, Con ogni diligenza.

45. “William Tindale, yet once more to the christen reader,” the supplementary preface to the 1534 version of the New Testament. The text is available in Wallis, The New Testament, pp. 15–19; and in Pollard, Records of the English Bible, pp. 178–84. In this same preface, Tyndale reviews George Joye’s unauthorized revision of the earlier New Testament translation, remarking sarcastically on how Joye’s version was “diligentlye oversene and correct.” When Joye’s text was brought before him, Tyndale seemed astonished to find that it purported to have “diligent correction[s]” in it.

46. “An Expert Criticism of Tyndale’s Version,” is the title given by Pollard to the text of Ridley’s letter to Henry Gold, February 24, 1527 (BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E. v. 362r, reproduced in Pollard, Records of the English Bible, pp. 122–26; the quotation is from p. 124).

47. OED, s.v., “fault,” def. 5b, which offers a 1523 quotation from the Lord Berners translation of Froissart as the first use of the term meaning “a slip, error, mistake” and offers several examples up through a 1633 citation of an errata sheet titled “Faults escaped.” The OED also notes, in defining escape (def 2b), “To issue unawares or involuntary from” and goes on, “Perhaps the obj. was originally dative…. Cr. Fr. Il lui est échappé une sottise.” It seems likely that the “faults escaped” idiom is a French one, while the “errors committed” phrase is Latin.

48. OED, s.v., “commit,” def III, “to perpetrate or perform (in a bad sense),” a meaning that the editors state “existed in Latin from the earliest period.” The word appears to enter English in this sense in the late fifteenth century, but the OED offers references for the subdefinition (6b), to commit “a folly, an error,” only from 1596.

49. According to the OED, the earliest appearance of the word “folio” in English is in More’s Debellation (1533), and the Dictionary’s editors state, “in the early instances the word may have been regarded as Latin” (s.v., “folio,” def. A.I.1).

50. The actual errors recorded are almost exclusively typographical, that is, dropped letters and wrong letters, transpositions, and an occasional word left out. There are what may be substantive changes in replacing the word “obtayne” with “attayne” and in changing the phrase “humblenes off angles” to “humblenes and holynes of angels.” It is worth comparing the 1535 English Bible of Matthew Coverdale, which on its final page lists only one erratum: “A faute escaped in pryntinge the New Testament. / Vpon the fourth leafe, the first syde, in the sixte chapter of S. Mathew. / Seke ye first the kyngdome of heaven: &c / Reade / Seke ye first the kyngdome of God: &c.” This change may represent a substantive alteration of the text rather than a printer’s error, but it is interesting that Coverdale uses the “faults escaped” idiom for recording it. I use the facsimile edition, The Coverdale Bible, 1535, intro. S. L. Greenslade (Folkstone: Dawson, 1975).

51. In Pollard, Records of the English Bible, p. 123. By “first prent,” Ridley most likely is referring to the incomplete version of the Gospels printed in Cologne in 1525, which appeared with prefaces and heavy glossing.

52. The OED uses this quotation to illustrate the meaning of “frenzy” as “agitation … wild folly, distraction, craziness” (s.v. “frenzy,” def. A2).

53. Pollard, Records, p. 124.

54. See the discussion in Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 94.

55. Pollard, Records, p. 124.

56. More’s remark is from the Dialogue Concerning Heresies, book 3, chap. 8 (Lawler, p. 285).

57. Pollard, Records, pp. 123–24.

58. All references to Elyot’s Dictionary are to the facsimile edition reproducing the copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Menston: Scolar, 1970).

59. See G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); David Starkey, “Representation Through Intimacy,” in Ioan Lewis, ed., Symbols and Sentiments (London: Academic, 1977), pp. 187–244; and idem, “Intimacy and Innovation: The Rise of the Privy Chamber, 1485–1547,” in The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Starkey (London: Longman, 1987), pp. 71–118. See, too, my discussion in Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 115–16, 133–35.

60. Stephen Merriam Foley, “Coming to Terms: Thomas Elyot’s Definitions and the Particularity of Human Letters,” ELH: A Journal of English Literary History 61 (1994): 214.

61. See the accounts in Starkey, “Representation Through Intimacy” and “Intimacy and Innovation.”

62. Starkey, “Representation Through Intimacy,” p. 198.

63. Quoted and discussed in Starkey, “Representation Through Intimacy,” p. 207.

64. Foley, “Coming to Terms,” p. 212.

65. Lawler, Dialogue, p. 450.

66. P. S. Allen, ed., Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1910), letter number 325, 2:52. Translation from R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson, The Correspondence of Erasmus, in The Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 3:65.

67. Thomson, Correspondence, 3:67; Allen, Opus Epist., 2:53.

68. Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v., “mendum,” “menda,” “mendose.”

69. Thomson, Correspondence, 3:276; Allen, Opus Epist., 2:228.

70. See Elaine Fantham, “Imitation and Evolution: The Discussion of Rhetorical Imitation in Cicero De Oratore 2.87–97 and Some Related Problems of Ciceronian Theory,” Classical Philology 73 (1978): 1–16.

71. Thomson, Correspondence, 3:276; Allen, Opus Epist., 2:228–29.

72. Stephen M. Foley, Sir Thomas Wyatt (Boston: Twayne, 1990), p. 37.

73. Jardine, Erasmus, pp. 27–53. For further details, see the notes and discussion in my Courtly Letters, pp. 97–99, 232.

74. Clouet’s portrait, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, is reproduced in Thomson, Correspondence, 3:274.

75. Thomson, Correspondence, 3:277; Allen, Opus Epist., 2:229.

76. See Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1879), s.v., “solvo,” def. I.A.1.e, p. 1725.

77. Thomson, Correspondence, 3:278; Allen, Opus Epist., 2:231.

78. David Greetham, “Textual Forensics,” PMLA 111 (1996): 32–51. Material in this section of my chapter develops, with substantial changes of emphasis, augmentation of detail, and correction of error, arguments I made in Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII, pp. 183–201.

79. See the account in Kenneth Muir, The Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1963), pp. 172–78; Perez Zagorin, “Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Court of Henry VIII: The Courtier’s Ambitions,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993): 113–41, esp. pp. 122–23, 132–33; Stephen M. Foley, Sir Thomas Wyatt, pp. 76–77.

80. Muir, Life and Letters, p. 186.

81. The two texts are preserved in British Library MS Harley 78, fols. 5–15, and edited versions appear in Muir, Life and Letters (Declaration, pp. 178–84; Defence, pp. 187–209). The reasons Wyatt did not deliver these speeches remain unclear, though Zagorin argues that Wyatt “went through the motions of confession and petitioning for mercy in order to save his life and regain his freedom” (“Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Court,” p. 135).

82. Muir, Life and Letters, p. 178. All subsequent references will be cited in the text.

83. See the repeated remarks on letters sent and received in Muir, Life and Letters, pp. 179–80.

84. On the humanist uses of collation, see Grafton, Defenders of the Text, pp. 47–75; and Trovato, Con ogni diligenza, esp. pp. 93–96.

85. I quote from the facsimile edition: Derek Brewer, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer: The Works, 1532… (Menston: Scolar, 1969), sig. Aii v. The OED cites this passage as the first appearance in English of the word “collation” used in textual criticism (s.v., “collation,” def. 3). “To collate,” “to confer,” and “to compare” are linked together in the example offered next by the OED, a 1568 reference to H. Campbell, ed., Love Letters of Mary Queen of Scots, app. 52: “The originals … were duly conferred and compared … with sundry other lettres … in collation whereof no difference was found” (emphases mine). The OED also notes, s.v., “confer,” def. 4, “to bring into comparison, compare, collate (exceedingly common from 1530 to 1650),” and offers a citation from 1533 as the first appearance of the word. “Collation,” however, appears in More’s 1532 Dialogue in precisely these textual-critical terms (uncited by the OED): Scripture “maye be well vnderstanden / by the collacyon … of one texte wyth an other” (Lawler, Dialogue, p. 451).

86. See W. A. Sessions, “Surrey’s Wyatt: Autumn 1542 and the New Poet,” in Rethinking the Henrician Era, ed. Peter G. Herman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 175.

87. All quotations from Wyatt’s poetry are from Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thompson, The Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969), cited by number in my text.

88. Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 22.

89. R. A. Rebholz, ed., Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 14–15.

90. Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII, pp. 191–97.

91. Quoted in Simpson, Proofreading, p. 47.

92. Compare Skelton’s indictment of Wolsey and King in Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? in John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979): “He sayth the kynge doth wryte, / And writeth he wottith nat what” (lines 678–79).

93. Simpson, Proofreading, p. 55.

94. Quoted in Simpson, Proofreading, p. 5. See, too, Murphy, “‘Came errour here by mysse of man.’”

95. Pseudo-Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 3.16.28, pp. 204–5.

1. Daniel Calder, “Histories and Surveys of Old English Literature: A Chronological Review,” Anglo-Saxon England 10 (1982): 244, quoted and discussed in Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 58. But Frantzen reports that Calder later “identified these remarks as insertions by Professor Peter Clemoes, editor of the journal in which this article appears” (p. 235 n. 110).

2. Michael Lapidge, “Textual Criticism and the Literature of Anglo-Saxon England,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Memorial Library 73 (1991): 17–45, these quotations from p. 17, quoting Housman, The Classical Papers of A. E. Housman, ed. J. Diggle and F. R. D. Goodyear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 3:1058.

3. See Frantzen, Desire for Origins; his introduction to his edited collection, Speaking Two Languages (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); and his subsequent essay, “The Fragmentation of Cultural Studies and the Fragments of Anglo-Saxon England,” Anglia 114 (1996): 310–39. See, too, the volume edited by Frantzen and John D. Niles, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997). For a particularly vivid exchange on the history, ideology, and potential direction of the field (something of a microcosm of the argumentativeness of Anglo-Saxonists of the mid-1990s), see Frantzen and Gillian Overing, letter to the editor, PMLA 108 (1993): 1177–78, on Michael Near, “Anticipating Alienation: Beowulf and the Intrusion of Literacy,” PMLA 108 (1993): 320–32.

4. For approaches drawing on a deconstructionist tradition, see John P. Hermann, Allegories of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989); for work in sign theory and Foucauldian history, see Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: “Grammatica” and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); for psychoanalytic approaches, see James Earl, Thinking About Beowulf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), and, to a lesser extent, John M. Hill, The Cultural World in Beowulf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); for a cultural studies approach, see Frantzen, “The Fragmentation of Cultural Studies”; for a variety of feminist approaches, see Jane Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986); Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennesey Olsen, eds., New Readings on Women in Old English Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990); Gillian Overing and Clare Lees, “Before History: Bodies, Metaphor, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon England,” Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (1999): 315–34.

5. Representative reviews and exchanges include Joyce Hill, review of Frantzen, Desire for Origins, in Anglia 111 (1993): 161–64; Frantzen’s reply, “Who Do These Anglo-Saxonists Think They Are, Anyway,” Æstel 2 (1994):1–43; Alexandra Hennesey Olsen’s review of Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender, in Speculum 67 (1992): 1024–26; Joseph Harris’s review of Hermann, Allegories of War, in Speculum 67 (1992): 983–86; Gernot Wieland’s review of Irvine’s Making of Textual Culture, in the online Bryn Mawr Medieval Review 95.2.10 (February 10, 1995); and Irvine’s response in the same forum, 95.3.12 (April 12, 1995), together with Wieland’s later response, 95.5.22 (May 22, 1995). Not all such reviews, however, were negative. For a review of the rhetoric of criticism in Old English studies of the mid-1990s, see John P. Hermann, “Why Anglo-Saxonists Can’t Read; or, Who Took the Mead out of Medieval Studies?” Exemplaria 7 (1995): 9–26.

6. Steven Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 7.

7. Available in facsimile as no. 248 in the series English Linguistics, 1500–1800, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1970), published in two volumes (all references are to this edition, henceforth referred to as Thesaurus). To my knowledge, there exists no complete translation into English of the Thesaurus. An abridged version of its grammatical material (not including the critical and historical portions I discuss here) was prepared by William Wotton, Linguarum vett. Septentrionalium thesauri grammatico-critici, et archaeologici, auctore Georgio Hickesio, conspectus brevis (London, 1708), and translated into English by Maurice Shelton, Wotton’s Short View of G. Hickes’s Grammatico-Critical and Archaeological Treasure of the ancient northern-languages (London, 1735).

8. The fullest account of Hickes’s life and works is Richard L. Harris, A Chorus of Grammars: The Correspondence of George Hickes and His Collaborators on the Thesaurus linguarum septentrionalium (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), whose critical and biographical materials augment its collection of letters to paint a vivid personal portrait. Earlier accounts of Hickes include David Charles Douglas, English Scholars, 1660–1730 (London: Eyre and Spottiswode, 1939; rev. ed, 1951), pp. 77–97; J. A. W. Bennett, “Hickes’s Thesaurus: A Study in Oxford Book-Production,” English Studies 1948 [Essays and Studies, n.s., 1] (1948): 28–45; and Shaun F. Hughes, “The Anglo-Saxon Grammars of George Hickes and Elizabeth Elstob,” in Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries, ed. Carl Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch (Boston: Hall, 1982), pp. 119–47. It was Edward Thwaites who dedicated his Heptateuchus, Liber Job et Evangelium Nicodemi: Anglo-Saxonice (London, 1698) to Hickes, addressing his preface to “Viro summo, Georgio Hickesio, S. T. P. Literaturae Anglo-Saxonicae Instauratori.”

9. Bennett, “Hickes’s Thesaurus,” pp. 28–29 and (on Mabillon’s response), p. 43.

10. Letter to the Revd. Dr. John Smith, December 6, 1703, in Harris, Chorus, letter 251, p. 390; also quoted and discussed in Bennett, “Hickes’s Thesaurus,” p. 37.

11. For a brief review of this chapter, without, however, reference to the materials I discuss here, see Harris, Chorus, pp. 77–79. For a fuller discussion of Hickes and Pindar, together with the bibliographical materials on Hickes’s reading and editing practices, see Seth Lerer, “The Anglo-Saxon Pindar: Old English Scholarship and Augustan Criticism in George Hickes’s Thesaurus,” Modern Philology 99 (2001): 26–65.

12. Harris, Chorus, p. 28.

13. Joseph Levine, The Battle of the Books (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 327–417, much of whose discussion is explicitly indebted to Harris’s researches.

14. Headnote to “The Second Olympique Ode of Pindar,” in The English Writings of Abraham Cowley (hereafter referred to as Waller), ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905–1906), 1:157.

15. Respectively, Cowley’s note 1 to “The Resurrection” (Waller, 1:183); and his preface to his Writings (Waller, 1:11).

16. Harvey D. Goldstein, “Anglorum Pindarus: Model and Milieu,” Comparative Literature 17 (1965): 309.

17. John Dennis, “The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry,” in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939), esp. the discussion at 1:332.

18. Thomas Sprat, The Life and Writings of Abraham Cowley, in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (1908; reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 2:131.

19. In 1677 Dryden appealed to Cowley’s example in his claim for the importance of “boldness of figures” in poetry. See Norman Maclean, “From Action to Image,” in Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 419. Dryden, “The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence,” in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 1:185–86. The 1680 preface to the Translation of Ovid’s Epistles reiterates these claims and finds in Cowley’s Pindar a translator’s precedent for what Dryden would seek to do with Ovid (1:237).

20. Dryden, Essays, 1:267. Similarly, in the preface to Albion and Albianus (1685), Dryden considers Cowley to have “admirably restored” Pindar “in our language [and] ought for ever to be the standard of them” (Essays, 1:272). Such praise, however, was not without criticism. Dryden himself, in the passage quoted above, noted that not all the Pindarists were as controlled as Cowley. A decade later, John Dennis found a slew of excesses in the Pindarique Odes that would unduly influence the poets of his own time. See, for example, his remarks in the preface to Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (1693) and the preface to the Court of Death (1695), in The Critical Works of John Dennis, 1:6, 1:42. By the turn of the century, the vogue for the Pindaric had produced what William Congreve would call, writing in 1706, “a Bundle of rambling incoherent Thoughts, express’d in a like Parcel of irregular Stanzas, which also consist of such another Complication of disproportion’d, uncertain and perplex’d Verses and Rhimes” (“A Discourse on the Pindarique Ode,” in William Congreve, Letters and Documents, ed. John C. Hodges [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964], p. 214).

21. See Steven Shankman, In Search of the Classic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), pp. 219–44; Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 334–58; Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 272 ff; and idem, “Lyric Forms,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 120–142.

22. Penelope Wilson, “‘High Pindaricks Upon Stilts’: A Case Study in the Eighteenth-Century Classical Tradition,” in Rediscovering Hellenism, ed. G. W. Clark and J. C. Eade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 28.

23. Cowley, “To Mr. Hobs,” 3.10–15, in Waller, 1:189.

24. As the English translator of Wotton’s abridgment recognized, calling it the Grammatico-Critical and Archaeological Treasure.

25. “Imo in nonnullis carminibus & carminum locis, praesertim asyndetis, ubi incalescens poeta praecipitare videtur orationem, multi tetrasyllabi, & pentasyllabi continuo leguntur, hic illic raro interpositis plurium syllabarum versibus: ut moris plerunque est apud metrorum Boethianorum translatorem in uersionibus Cottoniensis, & non raro apud Caedmonem, p. 72. Quemadmodum ista ostendunt, quae disjunctim hic infra ponuntur, more Pindaricorum, quibus haud usque adeo absimilia sunt” (Thesaurus, 1:180).

26. “The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic License,” in Dryden, Essays, 1:196.

27. Exodus, lines 447–51, in Thesaurus, 1:180. Hickes prints Old English in half-lines in a single column, each line beginning with a capital letter and ending with a period (or a colon). For purposes of space, I have realigned these half-lines into full lines corresponding to the lineation of modern editions. But I have kept Hickes’s spellings, even when they differ from modern editions. The standard, modern text of Exodus and other Old English poems can be found in George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936–52). All references to lineation are to this edition.

28. Metrum 3.2–3 and Metrum 20.210b–224a, from Meters of Boethius, in Thesaurus, 1:177, 1:178. Hickes prints all of Metrum 4 (Thesaurus, 1:185); the phrasing I discuss appears at lines 21b–26a of the poem. He also prints all of Metrum 6 (Thesaurus, 1:182); the phrasing I discuss appears at lines 11–15 of the poem.

29. Durham, 1–5, in Thesaurus 1:178. Hickes prints the entire poem with a Latin translation in a parallel column.

30. I have discussed Durham’s thematic and structural issues of landscape and control in my Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), pp. 199–204, adapted and developed in a larger context in my “Old English and Its Afterlife,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 7–34.

31. See Horace, ode 4.2.5–8 and 27–32. Compare Cowley’s version of these lines in “The Praise of Pindar,” especially the phrasing of “all inferior beauteous things” (4.12, in Waller, 1:179).

32. “Secundo, hoc ut credam facit, in Anglo-Saxonum, si dicam, Pindaricis audax illa & libera vocum, non solum a simpliciter loquentium, sed ab ornate dicentium ratione inter oratores maxime aliena transpositio, qua opus, ut videtur, non foret, nisi lex aliqua metri diversorum temporum & pedum observationem requirens, eam a Poetis postularet” (Thesaurus, 1:187).

33. Ode 4.2.10–12. “Whether he rolls new words through daring dithyrambs and is borne along in measures freed from rule.”

34. Cowley’s note to “To Dr. Scarborough,” in Waller, 1:200.

35. Sprat, Life and Writings, 2:132. Hickes’s notion of transpositio may have something to do with the separations of parts of speech in verse lines or, more generally, with what Dryden called the “disordered connexion of discourse” in the Pindaric ode. Indeed, Dryden’s terms are designed to translate hyperbaton, what the Rhetorica ad Herennium had defined as the “transposition” (transiectio), or separation, of adjectives from the nouns they modify: a device that, when used properly, could enable the arrangement of words “in such a way as to approximate a poetic rhythm” (poeticum numerum). See Dryden, “The Author’s Apology,” in Essays, 1:186. For the Rhetorica ad Herennium discussion, see Pseudo-Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. Harry Caplan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 3.32.44, pp. 338–39.

36. Meters of Boethius 9, Genesis, 2850–2922, and Exodus, 447–58a, 506b–14a, in Thesaurus, 1:184, 182–83, 180.

37. Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue, p. 347.

38. “Denique nullae in hisce carminibus, etsi lyricorum plane speciem prae se ferant, quas ego invenire potui, strophae, antistrophae vel epodi sunt, ex certo versuum numero constantes” (Thesaurus, 1:181).

39. Finnsburh Fragment, 35b–36, in Thesaurus 1:192.

40. Thesaurus, 1:192. Hickes quotes from Pindar, Olympian I, as published in Pindari Olympia, Nemea, Pythia, Isthmia, Una cum Latina omnium Versione Carmine Lyrico per Nicolaum Sudorum, ed. Richard West and Robert Welsted (Oxford: Clarendon, 1697), p. 1. For details on Hickes’s use of this volume, see my “Anglo-Saxon Pindar.” My English translations of Pindar’s phrasings modernize and adapt those in The Odes of Pindar, Including the Principal Fragments, ed. and trans. John Sandys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 4–7.

41. “Hoc quasi Pindaricum, Lyricumve genus carminis, si non invenit verus ille Caedmon, dictante numine, saltem, numine dictante, eo prius a vetustioribus Scaldis invento usus est; ut ex fragmento supra citato manifestum est. Lyricum autem genus carminis voco, quod lyrae & cantui aptum, pro veri carminis genio ac indole, ab inspirato Poeta cantari solebat, suorum poematum vel odarum cantore. Idem enim & carmina condere & canere erudiente spiritu docebatur” (Thesaurus, 1:189)

42. See, for example, Congreve’s association of Pindaric poetry with lyric when he notes that the odes “were sung by a Chorus, and adapted to the Lyre, and sometimes ot the Lyre and Pipe” (“Discourse on the Pindaric Ode,” p. 214).

43. Dryden, Essays 1:268.

44. I have examined in detail these quotations and their larger thematic, political, and bibliographical contexts in my “Anglo-Saxon Pindar.”

45. Jonathan Kramnick, Making the English Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 19.

46. For complete details on these selections, see my “Anglo-Saxon Pindar,” pp. 48–57.

47. Hickes to Edmund Gibson, April 24, 1691, quoted and discussed in Harris, Chorus, p. 36. For “exauctorat” (meaning “deprived of office or divested of authority”), a form of the word Hickes may have coined, see OED, s.v. “exauctorate” (which cites a 1680 sermon by Hickes as the first usage) and “exauctoration” (which cites a 1625 sermon by Donne for its first appearance).

48. George Hickes, A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of Worcester… (London: R. E., for Walter Kettilby, 1684), p. 9.

49. “Now let us really move on to those things which occur in their poems, the first of which offered for observation is the not infrequent use of words beginning with the same initial letter, which seems to enhance and to govern in a certain way the harmony of the poem. Now, in this matter, the following examples show just how our Anglo-Saxons imitated the poets (Anglo-Saxons, Greeks, and Latins), and also how—more to the point—all the poets do the same thing following those masters, the Muses, when the consonance of initial letters is heard in the poems of all peoples” (“Jam vero ad ea, quae eorum carminibus accidunt, progrediamur; quorum imprimis se observandum offert dictionum ab eadem initiali litera incipientium usus non infrequens, quae harmoniam carminis augere & quodammodo regere videtur. In hoc autem Anglo-Saxones & Graecos & Latinos, quemadmodum nostri Anglo-Saxonum Poetas imitantur; vel potius Musis ipsis magistris, omnes idem faciunt, quum in omnibus omnium gentium poematis initialium illa consonantia auditur, ut sequentia ostendunt” [Thesaurus, 1:195]). After offering his string of literary examples of alliteration, Hickes concludes: “So, too, through the inspiration of the Muses, the poets of the Anglo-Saxons rejoiced in (or praised by means of) the harmony of sounds that came from the same initial letter. This is the kind [of expression] that one finds in the real Caedmon, inspired by the divine spirit” (“Sic musis inspirantibus etiam Anglo-Saxonum Poetae vocum ab iisdem initialibus incipientiu[m] harmonia gaudebant. id genus sunt, in vero Caedmone, numine afflato” [Thesaurus, 1:197]).

50. Sermons that bear directly on these issues include his Spirit of Enthusiasm Exorcised… (London: Walter Kettilby, 1681) and The True Notion of Persecution Stated… (London: Walter Kettilby, 1681). For a brief review of some of these concerns, see David Gunto, “Kicking the Emperor: Some Problems of Restoration Parallel History,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 3 (1997): 109–27.

51. Dennis, Critical Writings of John Dennis, 1:370.

52. Maclean, “From Action to Image,” p. 420.

53. Nathaniel Noel, Bibliotheca Hickesiana; or, A Catalogue of the Library of the Reverend Dr. George Hickes (London, 1716), lists “Dryden’s Virgil with Cuts, 1698.”

54. Dennis, Critical Writings of John Dennis, 1:267.

55. Genesis, 1–4, in Thesaurus, 1:188, printing the Old English in short columns and the Latin as prose below. The entire passage is reproduced here.

56. Dennis, Critical Works of John Dennis, 1:216.

57. “Calendario jam finito subjungitur hoc carmen quasi dithyrambicum, cujus primus versus in majusculis miniatis exaratus nitet. In eo autem mores hominum, affectus animantium & inanimatorum naturae; res itidem alius generis, civiles, ethicae, theologicae describuntur in gnomis & sententiis asyndetis, quarum elegantia, splendor & proprietas Latine exhiberi non possunt” (Thesaurus, 1:207). In a letter to William Nicholson, dated April 25, 1699, Hickes refers to the “rambling dithyrambs” of this poem (Harris, Chorus, letter 122, p. 290).

58. T. A. Shippey, Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1976), p. 15.

59. Shippey states that “these poems have been described as ‘gnomic’ at least since 1826, when J. J. Conybeare used the term” (p. 12, referring to Conybeare, Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry [London, 1826]).

60. Paul Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

61. Roberta Frank, “The Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 75 (1993): 11–36.

62. Fry, The Poet’s Calling, p. 2.

63. Edmund Gibson to Arthur Charlett, January 10, 1695, quoted in Harris, Chorus, p. 79; emphases mine.

64. Hughes, “The Anglo-Saxon Grammars of George Hickes and Elizabeth Elstob”; Mechtild Gretch, “Elizabeth Elstob: A Scholar’s Fight for Anglo-Saxon Studies,” Anglia 177 (1999): 163–200, 481–524.

65. Harris, Chorus, p. 106. Over one hundred copies of the Thesaurus remained unsold as of 1713.

66. Joseph Henley, An Introduction to an English Grammar (London, 1726), p. xxxi, quoted in Samuel Kliger, “Neo-Classical Views of Old English Poetry,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 49 (1950): 520.

67. John Campbell, Rational Amusement (London, 1753), pp. 247, 263, 270, quoted in Kliger, “Neo-Classical Views,” p. 521. See, too, the brief (and bibliographically confusing) discussion in T. A. Birrell, “Society of Antiquaries,” Neophilologus 50 (1966): 110, on something called The Polite Correspondence (dated 1730), which refers to “a Saxon or a Greek ode” and offers comparisons between them.

68. Frank, “Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet,” p. 20.

69. Thomas Warton, A History of English Poetry (London, 1774), facsimile reprinting, ed. David Fairer (London: Routledge, 1998). The discussion in dissertation 1, “Of the origin of romantic fiction in Europe,” runs from sig. d3r to e4v, with footnotes to Hickes throughout. After his translation of Brunanburh (which Warton does not title as such but which he cites as coming from Hickes), he notes: “This piece, and many other Saxon odes and songs now remaining, are written in a metre much resembling that of the scaldic dialogue at the tomb of Angantyr…. The extemporaneous effusions of the glowing bard seem naturally to have fallen into this measure, and it was probably more easily suited to the voice or harp” (sig. e4v).

70. See Birrell, “Society of Antiquaries”; and even Frank, “Search,” which considers “the second half of the eighteenth century” to be one of the key periods in the formation “of the Saxon singer we know today” (p. 14). For an interesting twist on this tradition, arguing that it is, in fact, Scandinavian scholarship (Thorkelin, Grundtvig, and their heirs) that shapes the modern study of Old English literature, see Robert E. Bjork, “Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia and the Birth of Anglo-Saxon Studies,” in Frantzen and Niles, Anglo-Saxonism, pp. 111–32.

71. See Kramnick, Making the English Canon; Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Canon (Montreal: McGill-Queens, 1999); and Johns, The Nature of the Book.

72. T. A. Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

73. T. A. Shippey, The Road to Middle Earth (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982), p. 32.

74. The standard biography remains Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977). J. R. R. Tolkien: Scholar and Storyteller, ed. Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), offers essays 294 2. sublime philology in appreciation and analysis, as well as some scholarly contributions on medieval literature inspired by Tolkien’s researches. The journal Mythlore is devoted to the study of Tolkien and his contemporaries; articles of particular relevance to my account here include Bruce Mitchell, “J. R. R. Tolkien and Old English Studies: An Appreciation,” Mythlore 80 (1995): 206–12; and David Sandner, “The Fantastic Sublime: Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-Stories’ and the Romantic Sublime,” Mythlore 33 (1997): 4–7. In addition, a selection of letters has been edited by Carpenter and Tolkien’s son, Christopher, Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981).

75. Read to the British Academy on November 25, 1936, and published in Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245–96. It was separately published as a pamphlet by Oxford University Press (1936; reprint, 1958), and it has been frequently reprinted. I use the separately printed Oxford University Press pamphlet.

76. For a stimulating analysis of the lecture and its reception and response in Old English scholarship, see T. A. Shippey, “Structure and Unity,” in A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 149–74.

77. Julius Caesar, 5.5.68–75, ed. William and Barbara Rosen, in The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).

78. Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1811–15, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

79. Stanley Greenfield and Fred Robinson, A Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature to the End of 1972 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. xii.

80. Essays and Studies, n.s., 6 (1953): 1–18.

81. “To the Electors of the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford,” June 27, 1925, in Letters, pp. 12–13.

82. “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” p. 2.

83. The poem was published without line numbers.

84. “From a Letter to Christopher Tolkien,” February 21, 1958, in Letters, p. 264.

85. See my Literacy and Power, pp. 158–94; Frantzen, Desire for Origins, pp. 184–90; Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf, pp. 33–67; Near, “Anticipating Alienation”; James I. McNelis III, “Hrothgar’s Hilt, Theory, and Philology,” in Studies in English Language and Literature: “Doubt Wisely,” Papers in Honour of E. G. Stanley (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 175–85.

86. Seth Lerer, “Beowulf and Contemporary Critical Theory,” in A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 329–44. See, too, my “Grendel’s Glove,” ELH: A Journal of English Literary History 61 (1994): 721–51.

87. H. Aram Veeser, introduction to The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Vesser (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. xi.

88. Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), with the Old English text reproduced from the edition of C. L. Wrenn and W. F. Bolton, Beowulf, with the Finnsburgh Fragment (London: Harrap, 1973).

89. Meyer Abrams, gen. ed., and Stephen Greenblatt, assoc. gen. ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed. (New York: Norton, 2000).

90. All quotations from Heaney’s poetry are from Seamus Heaney: Poems, 1965–1975 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980), cited by title.

91. T. A. Shippey, “Beowulf for the Big-Voiced Scullions,” Times Literary Supplement, October 1, 1999, pp. 9–10.

92. Nicholas Howe, “Scullionspeak,” New Republic, February 28, 2000, pp. 32–37.

93. Longinus, ed. and trans. W. R. Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 7.2, pp. 54–55.

94. Pseudo-Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3.22.35, p. 219.

1. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Modern Library, 1994), chap. 2, p. 13. All quotations are from this edition, henceforth cited by chapter number and page number in my text.

2. On John Horne Tooke (1736–1812), see Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967; rev. ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1984); Daniel Rosenberg, “‘A New Sort of Logick and Critick’: Etymological Interpretation in Horne Tooke’s The Diversions of Purley,” in Language, Self, and Society, ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 300–29.

3. Gordon Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 448–50 and 563–65; and his “Poor Mr. Casaubon,” in Nineteenth-Century Literary Perspectives, ed. Clyde de L. Ryals and John Clubb (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974), pp. 255–70.

4. See Haight, George Eliot, pp. 448–49. Eliot’s review of Mackay originally appeared in the Westminster Review 54 (January 1851): 353–68 and is reprinted in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 27–45, with notes calling attention to resonances with Casaubon and Middlemarch generally.

5. Haight, George Eliot, pp. 49–51 (quotation from p. 51).

6. F. W. H. Meyers, “George Eliot,” Century Magazine 23 (November 1881): 60, quoted and discussed in Haight, George Eliot, p. 450. For more associations between Casaubon and Eliot herself, drawing on remarks made in her letters and journals, see Alan Mintz, George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 115–21.

7. See W. J. Harvey, “The Intellectual Background of the Novel: Casaubon and Lydgate,” in Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel, ed. Barbara Hardy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 25–37, as well as Anna Theresa Kitchel, ed., Quarry for Middlemarch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950); John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt, eds., George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Joseph Wiesenfarth, ed., George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–79, and Uncollected Writings (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981), esp. pp. xxxii–xxxvi and 86–135.

8. On the thematics of authorship in the novel, see Mintz, George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation; and Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 105–56. On readers and writers and the problem of textuality, see J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative and History,” ELH: A Journal of English Literary History 41 (1974): 455–73; and idem, “Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch,” in The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome H. Buckley, Harvard English Studies 6 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 125–45; Neil Hertz, “Recognizing Casaubon,” in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 75–96.

9. See Hertz, “Recognizing Casaubon.”

10. On Casaubon as a failure and for suggestive remarks on the theme of failure generally in the novel, see Pratt and Neufeldt, George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks, p. xlvii.

11. Gordon Haight, ed. The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78); Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, eds., The Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jerome Beatty, “Middlemarch” from Notebook to Novel: A Study in George Eliot’s Creative Method (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960).

12. Miller, “Optic and Semiotic,” p. 140. For the impact of Miller’s work on a sustained reading of Middlemarch, see Patricia McKee, Heroic Commitment in Richardson, Eliot, and James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 150–207.

13. Hertz, “Recognizing Casaubon,” p. 92.

14. Haight, “Poor. Mr. Casaubon,” p. 255.

15. Hertz, “Recognizing Casaubon,” pp. 75, 90.

16. Catherine Maxwell, “The Brooking of Desire: Dorothea and Deferment in Middlemarch,” Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 116.

17. See Peter Carlton, “Rereading Middlemarch, Rereading Myself,” in The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism, ed. Diane P. Freedman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 237–44.

18. In addition to Aarsleff’s still unsurpassed Study of Language, see K. M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); John Willinsky, Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Lynda Mugglestone, Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (New York: HarperCollins, 1998.

19. Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Cary H. Plotkin, The Tenth Muse: Victorian Philology and the Genesis of the Poetic Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989); Dennis Taylor, Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1993).

20. Quoted in Willinsky, Empire of Words, p. 119.

21. “The Philological Society’s English Dictionary” (unsigned), Academy, May 10, 1879, p. 413.

22. In addition to the printed editions of the Oxford English Dictionary (which appeared in fascicles from 1888 to 1928 under the title The New English Dictionary, then as The Oxford English Dictionary in the entire, multivolume publication of 1933, and then in the second edition of 1989), I have used the online version that incorporates revisions and supplementary material through the third edition (http://dictionary.oed.com). The online concordance to Middlemarch is http://princeton.edu/batke/eliot/middle.

23. George Lewes to John Blackwood, July 13, 1872, in Letters, 5:291, quoted in Haight, George Eliot, p. 445.

24. For the history and etymology of “author,” see A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (London: Scolar, 1984).

25. See Willinsky, Empire of Words, esp. pp. 92–112. But see E. G. Stanley’s review, Review of English Studies, n.s., 48 (1997): 218–20; and Charlotte Brewer, “OED Sources,” in Lexicography and the OED, pp. 40–58.

26. Willinsky, Empire of Words, p. 103. On Scott’s status in the nineteenth century and his relationships to later authors, see Judith Wilt, “Steamboat Surfacing: Scott and the English Novelists,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35 (1981): 459–86; Harry Shaw, The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

27. Quoted in Willinsky, Empire of Words, p. 103.

28. Mintz, George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation, p. 119; Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, pp. 105–56.

29. Quoted in Bodenheimer, Real Life, p. 174, from “Authorship,” a late fragment probably intended for Theophrastus Such, reprinted in Essays, pp. 437–42.

30. Eliot to Stowe, May 8, 1868, in Letters, 5:29; Eliot to Main, December 28, 1871, in Letters, 5:229; both quoted and discussed in Mintz, George Eliot, p. 120.

31. Quoted in Haight, George Eliot, p. 433; see now Harris and Johnston, Journals, p. 142.

32. Haight, George Eliot, p. 433.

33. Letters, 5:185, 212, quoted and discussed in Bodenheimer, Real Life, p. 175.

34. For the details of Middlemarch’s publication and Lewes’s plans for its serial appearance, see the discussion in Haight, George Eliot, pp. 431–38, which quotes the correspondence.

35. On Scott and Eliot, see Haight, George Eliot, passim; Price, Anthology, esp. pp. 117–18; and Harry Shaw, Naming Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

36. Eliot to Main, August 9, 1871, in Letters, 5:175. August 1871 also saw the centenary of Scott’s birth, and Eliot was invited to sit at the head table at the celebration in Edinburgh—though she eventually declined the invitation. No matter, Gordon Haight notes: “She celebrated Scott’s birthday by working quietly on Middlemarch” (George Eliot, p. 439).

37. Haight, George Eliot, p. 7. See, too, Price, Anthology, pp. 117–18 and p. 186 n. 49.

38. Haight, George Eliot, respectively pp. 58, 271, 319, 327.

39. Unsigned review, “A Dictionary of Biography,” Spectator, December 14, 1867, p. 1423.

40. Aarsleff, Study of Language, p. 255.

41. See Richard W. Bailey, “‘This Unique and Peerless Specimen’: The Reputation of the OED,” in Lexicography and the OED, pp. 207–27, esp. pp. 216–20 on Whitney and the Century Dictionary.

42. Trench, On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, quoted in Aarsleff, Study of Language, pp. 261–62.

43. The Spectator reviews, all unsigned, appeared as follows: December 16, 1871, pp. 1528–29; February 3, 1872, pp. 147–48; March 30, 1872, pp. 404–6; December 7, 1872, pp. 1554–55. A fifth, general review appeared under the title “George Eliot’s Moral Anatomy,” October 5, 1872, pp. 1262–64. See W. J. Harvey, “Criticism of the Novel: Contemporary Reception,” in Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel, pp. 125–47. For a complete list of all contemporary reviews, see Carol A. Martin, George Eliot’s Serial Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), pp. 270–73.

44. Spectator, December 16, 1871, p. 1528; February 3, 1872, p. 147.

45. Spectator, March 30, 1872, p. 404.

46. Spectator, December 7, 1872, pp. 1555–56.

47. Henry James, unsigned review, Galaxy, March 1873, p. 428.

48. Quoted in Haight, George Eliot, pp. 467–68.

49. James A. H. Murray, “President’s Address,” Transactions of the Philological Society, 1879: 575.

50. “Pronunciation,” in the introduction to the OED.

51. See Bodenheimer, Real Life, p. 243. See, too, Lewes to John Blackwood, July 13, 1872, in Letters, 5:291: “The shadow of old Casaubon hangs over me and I fear my ‘Key to all Psychologies’ will have to be left to Dorothea.”

52. See Harvey, “Intellectual Background”; U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Fusing Fact and Myth: The New Reality of Middlemarch,” in This Particular Web: Essays on Middlemarch, ed. Ian Adam (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), pp. 43–72. For some specifics, see Pratt and Neufeldt, George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks, pp. 100, 109, 133–39, 165, 245, 258, 262, 265, 267.

53. For a detailed accounting of Eliot’s reading in mythography, philology, and history, as well as other disciplines, all bearing on the texture of Middlemarch, see Pratt and Neufeldt, George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks, pp. xvii–xlii. On Eliot’s use of Max Müller, Henry Sumner Maine, and Friedrich Creuzer, see pp. xxvi–xxvii, xlii-lii. See, too, the “Check List of George Eliot’s Reading: January 1868 to December 1871,” pp. 279–88).

54. Review of The Progress of the Intellect, Westminster Review 54 (January 1851): 353–68, in Essays, pp. 27–45.

55. See Harvey, “Intellectual Background.”

56. See the discussion in Haight, George Eliot, pp. 563–65.

57. For the first remark, see George Eliot, p. 449; for the second, see “Poor Mr. Casaubon,” p. 266.

58. The material is summarized in Haight, George Eliot, pp. 49–52; and repeated in “Poor Mr. Casaubon.”

59. Haight, George Eliot, p. 50.

60. Eliza Lynn Linton, My Literary Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1899), p. 43. Haight quotes this passage, though without the introductory reference to Landor, in George Eliot, pp. 50–51; and “Poor Mr. Casaubon,” p. 268.

61. Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman, with Chapman’s Diaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), p. 25 and n. 17 there. Nowhere does he actually quote from Layton’s book.

62. George Soames Layton, Mrs. Lynn Linton (London, 1901), p. 67 n. 1.

63. Note, in particular, Casaubon’s remark, “I am fastidious in voices” (chap. 2, pp. 13–14).

64. Spectator, December 16, 1871, p. 1528 (“dry and formal,” “cobwebby”); December 7, 1872, p. 1555 (“a dried-up formalist,” “pedant”).

65. Athenaeum, December 2, 1871, p. 713.

66. James, unsigned review, p. 426.

67. OED, s.v. “repoussoir.”

68. OED, s.v. “ungauged,” where the quotation from Middlemarch is one of only three to illustrate the word.

69. OED, s.v. “manqué.” The quotation is from The Great Tradition (1948).

70. Hertz, “Recognizing Casaubon,” p. 90.

71. James, unsigned review, p. 426.

72. 72. Haight reviews the “usual pedants pointing out little errors” of legal, medical, and historical fact immediately after Middlemarch’s publication (George Eliot, pp. 446–47).

73. Academy, January 1, 1873, p. 3; Harvey, “Criticism of the Novel,” p. 189 n. 1.

74. See the discussions in Miller, “Optic and Semiotic” and “Narrative and History.”

75. Writer’s Notebook, pp. 115–16.

76. I reproduce the text as Eliot transcribed it, without correcting for spelling or capitalization.

77. Eliot to John Blackwood, September 25, 1861, in Letters, 7:291, quoted in David Carroll, ed., Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1986), p. v.

78. Miller, “Narrative and History,” p. 466; quoted and discussed in Hertz, “Recognizing Casaubon,” p. 77.

79. Eliot to Alexander Main, January 9, 1873, in Letters, 5:366, quoted and discussed in Carroll, Middlemarch, p. lx; and Allan C. Dooley, Author and Printer in Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), pp. 76–77.

80. Eliot to John Blackwood, September 19, 1873, in Letters, 5:441, quoted and discussed in Carroll, Middlemarch, p. lxi.

81. Quoted in Jerome Beatty, “The Text of the Novel: A Study of the Proof,” in Middlemarch: Critical Approaches, p. 38, with fuller discussion in Beatty, Middlemarch, from Notebook to Novel, pp. 106–7.

82. The passages are taken from Beatty, “The Text of the Novel,” pp. 59–60.

83. Eliot to John Blackwood, November 5, 1873, in Letters, 5:454, quoted in Dooley, Author and Printer, p. 86.

84. For a full discussion of Main’s errata hunting, see Dooley, Author and Printer, pp. 76–77. Dooley shows that Eliot was far more aware of the technologies of publishing and the status of her own text than she let on to Main and that her famous responses to his letters offer little more than a “genteel brush-off.”

85. Eliot to Main, January 9, 1873, in Letters, 5:366, discussed in Dooley, Author and Printer, p. 76.

86. Dooley, Author and Printer, pp. 76–77.

87. These texts are from Beatty, “Text of the Novel,” pp. 61–62.

88. Aarsleff, Study of Language, p. 35.

89. Reprinted in facsimile in two volumes as no. 127 in the series English Linguistics, 1500–1800, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1968), from which my quotations are taken.

90. Aarsleff, Study of Language, p. 64.

91. For Eliot’s record of Tooke’s death, see Writer’s Notebook, p. 30.

92. For this history, see Aarsleff, Study of Language; Dowling, Language and Decadence, and her earlier essay, “Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language,” PMLA 97 (1982): 160–78; Taylor, Hardy’s Literary Language, esp. pp. 207–52; and Holger Pedersen, Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John W. Spargo (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931).

93. Pedersen, Linguistic Science, p. 240.

94. Franz Bopp, Vergleichende Grammatik (1833), published in English as A Comparative Grammar, trans. Edward B. Eastwick (London: Williams and Northgate, 1845; rev., 1856). My quotations are from the 1856 edition. For the organicist vocabulary mentioned here, see pp. vi–viii.

95. Murray, “President’s Address,” p. 585.

96. Knoepflmacher, “Fusing Fact and Myth,” p. 45. For more details, see Pratt and Neufeldt, George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks, pp. xxviii–xxx.

97. On Schleicher and his family tree of languages, see the discussion in Pedersen, Linguistic Science, pp. 311–14, and, more generally, pp. 265–72. Schleicher’s Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen appeared in 1861–1862 and was soon translated (in abridged form) into English: A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages, trans. Herbert Bendall, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1874, 1877). For the family tree, see 1:8. For the relationships between historical philology and evolutionary biology in the nineteenth century, with special reference to the figurations of the family tree, see Stephen G. Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 108–45 (with reproductions of a remarkable set of nineteenth-century “trees,” linguistic, biological, and racial).

98. Writer’s Notebook, p. 87.

99. A. J. Engel, From Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-Century Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1983).

100. Aarsleff, Study of Language, p. 180, quoting August Boeckh. See, too, Rudolph Pfeiffer, Die Klassische Philologie von Petrarca bis Mommsen (Munich: Beck, 1982).

101. The discussion is attributed to R. Newton, principal of Hart Hall, Oxford, in 1750. Quoted and discussed in Engel, From Clergyman to Don, p. 15.

102. From the Edinburgh Review 14 (July 1809): 431, quoted and discussed in Engel, From Clergyman to Don, p. 16.

103. Edinburgh Review 54 (December 1831): 486, quoted and discussed in Engel, From Clergyman to Don, p. 21.

104. “The Legality of the Present Academic System…” (Oxford, 1832), pp. 22–23, quoted and discussed in Engel, From Clergyman to Don, p. 22.

105. Eclectic Review, 4th ser., 2 (August 1837): 125, quoted and discussed in Engel, From Clergyman to Don, p. 21.

106. “A Word for the Germans,” Pall Mall Gazette 1 (March 7, 1865): 201, in Essays, pp. 386–90.

107. Note, too, Madame de Stael’s comment on the perfection of the German academic system: “L’éducation intellectuelle est parfaite en Allemagne, mais tout s’y passe en théorie” (quoted in Aarsleff, Study of Language, p. 181).

108. See Haruko Momma, “A Man on the Cusp: Sir William Jones’s ‘Philology’ and ‘Oriental Studies,’” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 41 (1999): 160–79.

109. Aarsleff, Study of Language, p. 126.

110. Franz Bopp, A Comparative Grammar, trans. Edward B. Eastwick, rev. ed. (London: Williams and Northgate, 1856), p. vi.

111. On Müller, see Dowling, “Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language.”

112. Max Müller, “Comparative Mythology” (1856), in Selected Essays on Language, Mythology and Religion (London: Longmans, 1881), 1:299–451.

113. Müller does not identify the poem.

114. Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language (New York: Scribner’s, 1862), 1:35–36, quoted in Dowling, “Victorian Oxford,” p. 166.

115. She read Müller’s History of Sanskrit Literature between August and October 1869 (Writer’s Notebook, p. xli n. 41). For details of her reading, see Pratt and Neufeldt, George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebook, pp. xvii–xlii, 279–88; and the discussion throughout A Writer’s Notebook.

116. Writer’s Notebook, pp. 115–16. The passage was copied from Müller’s “Buddhist Pilgrims, 1857,” in Chips from a German Workshop, probably in early 1868 (see Wiesenfarth’s commentary, Writer’s Notebook, p. 209).

117. I argue for its relevance to Middlemarch even though Eliot copied out the passage, as Wiesenfarth notes, as part of her reading for Felix Holt.

118. Letters 1:29, quoted in Bodenheimer, Real Life, p. 39.

119. Writer’s Notebook, pp. 86–87, 92, 100, 118–19, 120, 121, 122–23. For the list-making process that helped organize the plot of the novel, which is recorded in Eliot’s Quarry for Middlemarch, see Carroll, Middlemarch, pp. xliii–lvii.

120. New English Dictionary, vol. 7 (1909).

121. Murray, Caught in the Web of Words, p. 136.

122. Murray, “President’s Address,” p. 568.

123. Jennett Humphreys, “English: Its Ancestors, Its Progeny,” Fraser’s Magazine, n.s., 26 (1882): 429–57. For Humphreys, see Mugglestone, Lexicography and the OED, p. 240.

124. “The Philological Society’s English Dictionary,” p. 413.

125. George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Westminster Review, October 1856, quoted and discussed in Price, Anthology, p. 125.

126. Thackeray, “Mr. and Mrs. Frank Berry,” Fraser’s Magazine, March 1843, quoted and discussed in Price, Anthology, pp. 125–26, 189 n. 81.

127. Dickens, “Our English Watering-Place,” quoted and discussed in Price, Anthology, p. 128.

128. Andrew Lang, “Mrs. Radcliffe’s Novels,” Cornhill Magazine, n.s., 9 (1900): 24–43, quoted and discussed in Price, Anthology, p. 128.

129. Price, Anthology, p. 128.

130. This quotation stands, too, as the epigraph to Lynda Mugglestone, “‘Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest’: The New English Dictionary,” in Lexicography and the OED, pp. 2–21, though Mugglestone curiously replaces the word “white” with an ellipsis (p. 1).

131. George Eliot, Silas Marner (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), chap. 2, p. 21. The OED quotation offers only, “Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment.”

132. Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2 vols. (London: J. and J. Knapton, 1728).

133. Humphreys, “English,” p. 432.

134. James, unsigned review, p. 428.

135. Adams Sherman Hill, Principles of Rhetoric, new ed. (New York: American Book Company, 1895). Extracts from Middlemarch are printed and discussed on pp. 16, 53, 104, 116, 195.

136. As praised in Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, “Classics and Colleges,” in Essays and Studies (New York: Stechert, 1924), p. 62 (this essay was originally written in the late 1860s).

137. William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language (New York: D. Appleton, 1875; reprint, New York: Dover, 1979), pp. 318–19.

138. William Dwight Whitney, “Müller’s Chips from a German Workshop,” in Oriental and Linguistic Studies, 2d ser. (New York: Scribners, 1874), pp. 137, 148.

139. William Dwight Whitney, “Müller’s Lectures on Language,” in Oriental and Linguistic Studies, 1st ser. (New York: Scribners, 1872), p. 260.

140. William Dwight Whitney, Max Müller and the Science of Language (New York: Appleton, 1892), p. 75.

1. H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 4th ed., abr. and ed. Raven I. McDavid Jr. (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. 99.

2. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

3. Mason Locke Weems, The Life of Washington, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 2, quoted and discussed in Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, p. 122.

4. Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, p. 122.

5. William Thornton, Cadmus; or, a Treatise on the Elements of Written Language (Philadelphia, 1793), pp. v–vii, quoted in David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 25.

6. John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (Cambridge, Mass.: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1810; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 2:281.

7. Henry Tuckerman, Characteristics of Literature Illustrated by the Genius of Distinguished Writers (Philadelphia, 1851), p. 116, quoted in Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1984), p. 149.

8. On the concept of manifest destiny (the phrase apparently coined in 1845) and American conceptions of language, see Julie Tetel Andresen, Linguistics in America, 1769–1924 (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 125. Among the many studies of the place of language study in the American tradition, see, in particular, Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Michael Kramer, Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Gavin Jones, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Michael West, Transcendental Wordplay: America’s Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000).

9. George Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. xi.

10. Albert S. Cook, “The Province of English Philology,” PMLA 12 (1898), reprinted in part in Origins of Literary Studies in America, ed. Gerald Graff and Michael Warner (New York: Routledge, 1989) p. 99.

11. Adams, Lectures, 1:50–51; Gildersleeve, “Abstract of Presidential Address to the American Philological Association,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 40 (1909): xxxvii, xxxix.

12. De Oratore, ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), 2.44.188, 190.

13. Samuel Johnson, preface to Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755), B2v.

14. For the history of the Boylston professorship and the institutional contexts that shaped its teaching of rhetoric, see Ronald F. Reid, “The Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, 1806–1904: A Case Study in Changing Concepts of Rhetoric and 304 4. ardent etymologies Pedagogy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 45 (1959): 239–57; Donald M. Goodfellow, “The First Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory,” New England Quarterly 19 (1946): 372–89; Paul E. Ried, “The First and Fifth Boylston Professors: A View of Two Worlds,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 229–40; and James A. Berlin, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).

15. For Adams’s use of Cicero’s Tusculans, see Greg Russell, “John Quincy Adams: Virtue and the Tragedy of the Statesman,” New England Quarterly 69 (1996): 68–69. For a general review of Adams’s debts to Cicero, especially De Oratore, see Lousene G. Rousseau, “The Rhetorical Principles of Cicero and Adams,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 2 (1916): 397–409. For the impact of Cicero on American rhetorical theory and practice, see Fliegelman, Declaring Independence; and, for more particulars, Mary Rosner, “Reflections on Cicero in Nineteenth-Century England and America,” Rhetorica 4 (1986): 153–82.

16. Adams, Lectures, 1:12–13, ellipses in original. Future references will be cited by volume and page number in the text.

17. Cicero, De Inventione, ed. and trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), 1.1.2, pp. 4–5. Future references in text.

18. Horne Tooke, The Diversions of Purley (London: J. Johnson’s, 1798), 1:40, quoted and discussed in Daniel Rosenberg, “‘A New Sort of Logick and Critick’: Etymological Interpretation in Horne Tooke’s The Diversions of Purley,” in Language Self and Society, ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 306.

19. Quoted in Simpson, Politics of American English, p. 82.

20. On Tooke’s American reception, see Simpson, Politics of American English, pp. 81–90.

21. Quoted in Simpson, Politics of American English, p. 81.

22. See Simpson, Politics of American English, pp. 83–84.

23. See Michael Kramer, Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, p. 62; and Simpson, Politics of American English, p. 83.

24. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), esp. pp. 197–98.

25. Adams does not specify the source, stating only that it is a passage “which you have all heard a thousand times.” It is Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.12–17.

26. See Simpson, Politics of American English, pp. 204–5.

27. Tooke, Diversions, 1:399, quoted and discussed in Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1984), pp. 123–34.

28. Tooke, Diversions, 1:51, quoted and discussed in Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967; rev. ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 13.

29. Aarsleff, Study of Language, p. 48: “[Abbreviation] was the great discovery which to his contemporaries made Horne Tooke the immortal ‘philologer.’”

30. Port Folio, 3d ser., 4 (August 1810): 122–36. For the political conflicts that may stand behind this review (most likely by the journal’s editor, Joseph Dennie) and the broader relationships between the journal and the Adams family, see Linda K. Kerber and Walter John Morris, “Politics and Literature: The Adams Family and the Port Folio,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 23 (1966): 450–76; and William C. Dowling, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801–1812 (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), esp. p. 97 n. 1.

31. See Reid, “Boylston Professorship”; Ried, “First and Fifth Boylston Professors.”

33. Adams Sherman Hill, The Principles of Rhetoric, new ed. (New York: American Book, 1895), p. v.

34. James Morgan Hart, “College Course in English Literature,” in Origins of Literary Studies, ed. Gerald Graff and Michael Warner, p. 35.

35. Cook, “Province of English Philology,” p. 99.

36. While Americans had been attending German universities since the end of the eighteenth century, men of the generation of Whitney, Gildersleeve, and Child were the first to return and make significant academic careers, especially in philology, at major American universities. On Whitney’s German experience in particular, see Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 119–30.

37. For general surveys of the life and work, see Brigitte Nerlich, Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal and Wegener (London: Routledge, 1990); and Andresen, Linguistics in America, pp. 135–68. For detailed reviews of Saussure’s debts to Whitney, see Roman Jakobson, “The World Response to Whitney’s Principles of Linguistic Science,” in Whitney on Language, ed. Michael Silverstein (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), pp. xxv–xlv; and Richard W. Bailey, “William Dwight Whitney and the Origins of Semiotics,” in The Sign: Semiotics Around the World, ed. R. W. Bailey (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978), pp. 68–80. Linda Dowling has developed the argument about Whitney’s “clairvoyant glimpse” of structuralist linguistic principles, especially in the context of the Neogrammarian work of the 1870s. See her Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 80–81. For an important review of Whitney’s work on American dialects in the larger context of nineteenth-century American philological reflection, see Jones, Strange Talk, pp. 14–36.

38. William Dwight Whitney, “Müller’s Rig-Veda Translation,” in Oriental and Linguistic Studies, 1st ser. (New York: Scribner’s, 1872), p. 139 (hereafter OLS I). For an argument that Whitney’s work is really indebted to that of the earlier scholar Johann Madvig (and therefore that Whitney is not the originator of the Saussurian notions of the arbitrariness of the sign or the conventionality of language), see Hans Aarsleff, From Locke To Saussure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 293–334.

39. William Dwight Whitney, Language and the Study of Language (New York: Scribner’s, 1889), p. 129 (hereafter LSL).

40. E. W. Hopkins, “Max Müller,” Nation, November 1, 1900, pp. 343–44, quoted in Linda Dowling, “Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language,” PMLA 97 (1982): 175.

41. “Müller’s History of Vedic Literature,” in OLS I, p. 96.

42. “Müller’s Lectures on Language,” in OLS I, p. 240.

43. “Müller’s Chips from a German Workshop,” in Oriental and Linguistic Studies, 2d ser. (New York: Scribner’s 1874), p. 136 (hereafter OLS II).

44. William Dwight Whitney, Max Müller and the Science of Language (New York: Appleton, 1892), p. 75.

45. “The Elements of English Pronunciation,” in OLS II, pp. 202–76; “Alford’s Queen’s English,” in OLS II, pp. 166–80, (quotation from p. 167).

46. “How Shall We Spell,” in OLS II, pp. 181–201 (quotations from pp. 181, 199).

47. Webster, Dissertations (Boston, 1789), p. 34, quoted and discussed in Simpson, Politics of American English, p. 59.

48. Anonymous (Archibald Campbell), Lexiphanes (London, 1767), quoted and discussed in Simpson, Politics of American English, p. 59.

49. “Elements of English Pronunciation,” in OLS II, p. 203, emphases mine.

50. Webster, Compendious Dictionary (Hartford and New Haven, 1806), p. xvi, quoted and discussed in Simpson, Politics of American English, p. 69.

51. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, “Grammar and Aesthetics,” in Essays and Studies (New York: Stechert, 1924), p. 141 (hereafter ES).

52. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, Hellas and Hesperia (New York: Henry Holt, 1909), p. 119 (hereafter HH).

53. George Eliot, “A Word for the Germans,” in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 390.

54. For Gildersleeve’s life and work, see the essays collected in Ward W. Briggs Jr. and Herbert W. Benario, eds., Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

55. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, “Formative Influences,” Forum 10 (February, 1891): 608, quoted in Deborah Reeves Hopkins, “Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve: The Charleston Background,” in Gildersleeve, p. 6.

56. See Ward W. Briggs, Jr., “Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the University of Virginia,” in Gildersleeve, pp. 9–20; Stephen Newmyer, “Gildersleeve on the Study of the Classics,” in ibid., pp. 27–35; George A. Kennedy, “Gildersleeve, The Journal, and Philology in America,” in ibid., pp. 42–49, esp. p. 44, on Gildersleeve’s desire to be buried in Charlottesville.

57. The Creed of the Old South, 1865–1915 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1915), esp. p. 14.

58. Hopkins, “Charleston Background,” p. 5.

59. See Gregory A. VanHoosier-Carey, “Byrhtnoth in Dixie: The Emergence of Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Postbellum South,” in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), pp. 157–72.

60. J. B. Henneman, “The Study of English in the South,” Sewanee Review 2 (1894): 180–197.

61. Quoted in Kennedy, “Gildersleeve, The Journal, and Philology in America,” p. 44.

62. Gildersleeve, The Creed of the Old South, pp. 113–14 (hereafter Creed).

63. “Müller’s Rig-Veda Translation,” in OLS I, p. 139; LSL, p. 238.

64. Hart, “College Course in English Literature,” p. 35.

65. Frank M. Rarig and Halbert S. Greaves, “National Speech Organizations and Speech Education,” in History of Speech Education in America, ed. Karl Wallace (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954), p. 496.

66. On the Cornell school, see Theodore Otto Windt Jr., “Everett Lee Hunt on Rhetoric,” Speech Teacher 21 (1972): 177–92; and idem, “Hoyt H. Hudson: Spokesman for the Cornell School of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982): 186–200. See, too, the more personal survey of Edward P. J. Corbett, “The Cornell School of Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Review 4 (1985): 4–14. Two collections of essays representative of the school are A. M. Drummond, ed., Studies in Rhetoric and Public Speaking in Honor of James Albert Winans (1925; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1962); and Donald C. Bryant, ed., The Rhetorical Idiom: Essays in Rhetoric, Oratory, Language, and Drama Presented to Herbert August Wichelns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958).

67. Windt, “Hoyt H. Hudson,” p. 192.

68. Harry Caplan, “Latin Panegyrics of the Empire,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 10 (1924): 41–52.

69. [Cicero], Ad C. Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954).

70. See Franklin H. Knower, “Graduate Theses—An Index of Graduate Work in the Field of Speech from 1902–1934,” Speech Monographs 2 (1935): 7.

71. See, in particular, E. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965; 3d ed., 1990).

72. See Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), esp. pp. 282–317; Victoria A. Kahn, “Humanism and the Resistance to Theory,” in Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 373–96; John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 176–265; James Kastely, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 195–220.

73. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 6.

74. Ibid., p. 105–6, quoting Nietzsche’s notes on rhetoric as published in Gesammelte Werke (Munich: Musarion, 1922), 5:300.

75. See David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul De Man (New York: Poseidon, 1991); and John Bender and David E. Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric,” in The Ends of Rhetoric, ed. Bender and Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

76. “The Rhetoric of Blindness,” in Blindness and Insight, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 103.

77. “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight, pp. 186–87.

78. “The Return to Philology,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 24.

79. Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); idem, Shakespeare From the Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

80. In The Ends of Rhetoric, pp. 60–73, 219–22.

81. Parker, “Metaphor and Catachresis,” p. 61.

82. Cicero, De Oratore, 3. 38. 155, pp. 121–23, quoted in Parker, “Metaphor and Catachresis,” p. 66. My quotation here is from Rackham’s translation, without the parenthetical Latin original phrases in Parker’s quotation.

83. Parker, “Metaphor and Catachresis,” p. 66.

84. [Cicero], Ad C. Herennium, p. 32.

1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 19–20. The original German reads:

Throughout this chapter, when I occasionally attend to Auerbach’s German, all quotations will be from this edition. When I cite both the English translation and the German, the first reference is to the English, the second to the German, except where otherwise noted.

2. In German: “[W]er etwa das Verhalten der einzelnen Menschen und Menschengruppen beim Aufkommen des Nationalsozialismus in Deutschland, oder das Verhalten der einzelnen Völker und Staaten vor und während des gegenwärtigen (1942) Krieges erwägt, der wird fühlen, wie schwer darstellbar geschichtliche Gegenstände überhaupt, und wie unbrauchbar sie für die Sage sind” (p. 25).

3. Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 106.

4. For Spitzer, see Leo Spitzer: Representative Essays, ed. Alban Forcione, Herbert Lindenberger, and Madeline Sutherland (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), especially John Freccero’s foreword on Spitzer as teacher (pp. xi–xx). Spitzer and Auerbach are often paired in the impressions of mid-century German émigré medievalists. See, for example, the reflections of Paul Zumthor: “The work of the gentle Auerbach, with his large eyes and his expression of timid goodness, marked a generation, otherwise but no less than the work of the brilliant Spitzer, that great conversationalist, self-confident and beloved by women” (Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. Sarah White [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985], p. 21). See, too, Harry Levin, “Two Romanisten in America,” in The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 467–83. On Curtius and Auerbach, see Geoffrey Green, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). For a discussion of Auerbach’s response to Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages in his “Philologie der Weltliteratur” of 1952, see Paul Bové, Intellectuals in Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 205–6. For an amusing anecdote about Auerbach’s encounter with Curtius in Princeton in 1949, related as an icon of their respective scholarly and emotional personalities, see Robert Fitzgerald, Enlarging the Change: The Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism, 1949–1951 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), pp. 21–22. For Jaeger, see the essays collected in Werner Jaeger Reconsidered, ed. William M. Calder III, Illinois Classical Studies, supp. 3 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1992).

5. Erich Auerbach, Introduction aux études de la philologie romane (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1949), p. 9. The original French reads: “La philologie est l’ensemble des activités qui s’occupent méthodiquement du langage de l’homme, et des oeuvres d’art composées dans ce langage…. Le besoin de constituer des textes authentiques se fait sentir quand un peuple d’une haute civilisation prend conscience de cette civilisation, et qu’il veut préserver des ravages du temps les oeuvres qui constituent son patrimoine spirituel.” Page numbers following subsequent quotations from this work refer to this edition.

6. See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “‘Un Souffle d’Allemagne ayant passé’: Friedrich Diez, Gaston Paris, and the Genesis of National Philologies,” Romance Philology 40 (1986): 1–37 (with a full bibliography of primary and secondary sources); and the following contributions to the special “New Philology” volume of Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990): Stephen G. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture” (pp. 1–10); R. Howard Bloch, “New Philology and Old French” (pp. 38–58); Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies” (pp. 87–108).

7. From Diez’s remarks on his candidacy for a lectureship at the University of Bonn, quoted in Gumbrecht, “‘Un Souffle d’Allemagne ayant passé,’” p. 18.

8. From the opening of Aubertin’s Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française au moyen age d’après les travaux les plus récents, quoted in Gumbrecht, “‘Un Souffle d’Allemagne ayant passé,’” pp. 26–27.

9. For a chronicle of these attempts, see Gumbrecht, “‘Un Souffle d’Allemagne ayant passé,’”; and Bloch, “New Philology and Old French.”

10. In addition to the contributions to the Speculum “New Philology” issue, see William D. Paden, ed., The Future of the Past (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994); and R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, eds., Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

11. Volumes published from those conferences are Seth Lerer, ed., Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); and the special issue of Poetics Today, “Erich Auerbach and Literary Representation,” 20, no. 1 (1999). In addition to these volumes (which together discuss the full previous critical bibliography on Auerbach), see Michael Holquist, “The Last European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History of Cultural Criticism,” Modern Language Quarterly 54 (1993): 371–91; David Damrosch, “Auerbach in Exile,” Comparative Literature 47 (1995): 97–117. For a chronicle of Auerbach’s reception—from the first reviews of Mimesis through the 1980s—see Herbert Lindenberger, “On the Reception of Mimesis,” in Literary History, pp. 195–215.

12. See Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 31–47; and my discussion at the close of this chapter.

13. See Aamir R. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical Inquiry 25 (1998): 95–125, especially this remark: “The German Jewish critic in (‘Oriental’) exile becomes for Said the paradigmatic figure for modern criticism” (p. 104).

14. Damrosch, “Auerbach in Exile,” p. 115.

15. See Bové, Intellectuals in Power.

16. See Egbert J. Bakker, “Mimesis as Performance: Rereading Auerbach’s First Chapter,” Poetics Today 20 (1999): 11–26; Damrosch, “Auerbach in Exile”; Luiz Costa-Lima, “Auerbach and Literary History,” in Literary History, pp. 50–60; Jesse Gellrich, “Figura, Allegory, and the Question of History,” in Literary History, pp. 108–23.

17. For the Latin roots of “vernacular,” see the Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. “verna,” “vernaculus.”

18. Homer, The Odyssey, 19.407–9, ed. and trans. A. T. Murray (London: Heinemann, 1919), 2:256–59 (the quotation is from pp. 257–58).

19. Damrosch, “Auerbach in Exile,” p. 114.

20. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 7.

21. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul,” p. 110.

22. The original German of the epigraph for this section reads: “so daß ich auf fast alle Zeitschriften, auf die meisten neueren Untersuchungen, ja zuweilen selbst auf eine zuverlässige kritische Ausgabe meiner Texte verzichten mußte” (p. 497; English translation, p. 557). On the “Adam and Eve” chapter, see, too, Stephen G. Nichols, “Philology in Auerbach’s Drama of (Literary) History,” in Literary History, pp. 63–77; and Suzanne Fleischman, “Medieval Vernaculars and the Myth of Monoglossia: A Conspiracy of Linguistics and Philology,” in Literary History, pp. 92–104.

23. Early in the twentieth century, the play was known as the Mystère; more recently, it is referred to as the Jeu d’Adam; those who locate it primarily in its liturgical setting call it the Ordo Representationis Ade.

25. S. Etienne, “Note sur les verse 279–287 du Jeu d’Adam,” Romania 48 (1922): 592–95. For a complete review of the textual problems of this passage, together with an account of Auerbach’s probable sources, editions, and critical discussions available to him, see Nichols, “Philology in Auerbach’s Drama,” pp. 75–77.

26. Etienne, “Note,” pp. 592, 593.

27. In French: “les sauver non seulement de l’oubli, mais aussi de changements, mutilations et additions que l’usage populaire ou l’insouciance des copistes y apportent nécessairement” (p. 9).

28. Gumbrecht, “‘Un Souffle d’Allemagne ayant passé,’” p. 2.

29. Léon Gautier, “Chronique,” Revue des questions historiques 9 (1870): 496, translated and discussed in Bloch, “New Philology and Old French,” p. 40.

30. Henri Massis, Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1913), p. 107, translated and discussed in Bloch, “New Philology and Old French,” p. 40.

31. For the rise of chairs of literature in France and Germany in the nineteenth century, see Gumbrecht, “‘Un Souffle d’Allemagne,’” pp. 31–32. For the rise “of a new paradigm in the history of French scholarship, which will create its own publication outlets in Romania (from 1872 on) and the Société des Anciens Textes Français (from 1875),” see ibid., p. 27. For the phrasings of Gaston Paris, see his Contges orientaux dans la littérature français du moyen age (Paris, 1875), quoted in Bloch, “New Philology and Old French,” pp. 41–42.

32. Bloch, “New Philology and Old French,” p. 40.

33. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” in Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 43–61.

34. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 151; p. 148.

35. Actually, they are the words of the Book of Micah 7:6, as quoted by Bernard.

36. See, for example, Timothy Bahti, “Vico, Auerbach, and Literary History,” in Vico Past and Present, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1981), pp. 249–66; Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic, 1975), p. 363 (where Said calls Auerbach “Vico’s principal and most profound literary student”); Luiz Costa-Lima, “Erich Auerbach: History and Metahistory,” New Literary History 19 (1988): 467–99; idem, “Auerbach and Literary History,” in Literary History, pp. 50–60; Claus Uhlig, “Auerbach’s ‘Hidden’ (?) Theory of History,” in Literary History, pp. 36–49.

37. See Bové, Intellectuals in Power, pp. 79–208.

38. See, too, Herbert Lindenberger, “On the Reception of Mimesis,” in Literary History, pp. 195–213; and Carl Landauer, “Auerbach’s Performance and the American Academy; or, How New Haven Stole the Idea of Mimesis,” in Literary History, pp. 195–213.

39. One exception to this dehistoricized Mimesis among the early reviews is René Wellek, “Auerbach’s Special Realism,” Kenyon Review 16 (1954): 299–306.

40. Romance Philology 2 (1949): 338.

41. Robert Fitzgerald, Enlarging the Change, pp. 21–22.

42. See Liselotte Dieckmann, “Akademische Emigranten in der Türkei,” in Verbannung: Aufzeichnungen deutscher Schriftsteller im Exil, ed. Egon Schwarz and Matthias Wegner (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1964), pp. 122–26. But we now know that Auerbach’s situation in Istanbul was much more complex. He may have, in fact, had access to major research collections. His personal correspondence reveals that, at least on one occasion, he formally requested an extension of his stay in Turkey from the German government. And, throughout his letters, there emerges what has been called an “air of irony” about his stay. See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress’: Auerbach’s Everydays,” in Literary History, pp. 13–35; and Jesse Gellrich, “Figura, Allegory, and the Question of History,” in Literary History, pp. 109–23, esp. pp. 110–11. In 1939 Auerbach could write to Martin Hellweg: “Haben Sie die Arbeiten von E. R. Curtius über M[ittel] A[lter] gelesen, die in der Z[eitschrift] [für] Rom[anische] Ph[ilologie] … erscheinen sint?” (letter of May 22, 1939, in Erich Auerbachs Briefe an Martin Hellweg (1939–1950), ed. Martin Vialon [Tübingen: Francke, 1997], p. 57)—implying, I take it, that Auerbach had seen it.

43. For the details of Auerbach’s publications from 1946 to 1948, see the bibliography of his writings in Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Mannheim, with a new foreword by Jan Ziolkowski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 399–400.

44. “Epilegomena zu Mimesis,” Romanische Forschungen 65 (1953): 1–18.

45. Comparative Literature 1 (1949): 83–84. It cannot escape notice that Spitzer’s now most famous essay, also published in 1949, was “American Advertising Explained as Popular Art,” with its brilliant close reading of the rhetoric of Sunkist Orange posters—a lecture on fruits if ever there was one. And it cannot escape notice, too, that Adam and Eve had themselves received something of a lecture on fruits and did get hold of an apple. Spitzer’s essay is reprinted in Leo Spitzer: Representative Essays, pp. 327–56.

46. Paul Aebischer, ed., Le Mystère d’Adam (Geneva: Droz, 1963), pp. 51–52.

47. Leif Sletsjöe, ed., Le Mystère d’Adam (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), pp. 21, 85. For additional information on manuscripts and editions, see Nichols, “Philology in Auerbach’s Drama,” pp. 75–77.

48. David Bevington, ed., Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), text on p. 94, discussion on p. 79, quoting Auerbach’s discussion of the everyday element of the play’s realism (from Trask’s translation of Mimesis, p. 151) in support of an argument that the play was “intended for an audience of ordinary men and women.” For a counterargument to this tradition of interpretation, reading the play as primarily a liturgical, Latin occasion rather than a popular, vernacular one, see Steven Justice, “The Authority of Ritual in the Jeu d’Adam,” Speculum 62 (1987): 851–64.

49. Nichols speculates that “[h]is general inattentiveness to textual questions, in the technical sense of the term, suggests a philological perspective … more fixed on the ‘historical horizon’ than on textual studies. The best text for Auerbach was the one that most accurately could convey an image of the medieval imagination that was most exciting, most satisfying to modern sensibilities” (“Philology in Auerbach’s Drama,” p. 76).

50. From Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public, p. 20. This passage generates the discussion of Auerbach’s method in Thomas M. De Pietro, “Literary Criticism as History: The Example of Auerbach’s Mimesis,” Clio 8 (1979): 377–87; and it forms the point of argument for the critique of Auerbach’s “understanding of humanism’s contradictory development” in Bové’s Intellectuals in Power, pp. 206–7. Auerbach’s claim to write history also forms the basis of the foreword to the reprinting of Literary Language by Jan Ziolkowski (pp. ix–xxxii), which, among other things, avers that “readers should not exaggerate the topicality—or the ideological elements” of Auerbach’s work (p. xxii) and offers a vision of “the constancy of Auerbach in his self-understanding and in his lifelong engagement with European literature” as an “indeed attractive” alternative to the situation of “our days” in which “the self-definitions of the professors—and the professionals—who are hired to teach and write about literature change with dizzying rapidity” (p. xxvii).

51. Quoted in Landauer, “Auerbach’s Performance and the American Academy,” p. 187 and p. 288 n. 20.

52. For discussion of the early American reviews and the larger contexts for Mimesis’s absorption into academic practice, see Landauer’s entire essay, pp. 179–94.

53. Most notably in Jan Ziolkowski’s foreword to the reprinting of Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public. For another reminiscence of Auerbach and his place in a broader postwar humanist ideal, see Thomas R. Hart, “Literature as Language: Auerbach, Spitzer, Jakobson,” in Literary History, pp. 227–39.

54. Nichols, “Philology in Auerbach’s Drama,” p. 63.

55. Alvin Kernan, In Plato’s Cave (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 108.

56. The book was originally published in German as Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1958) and in English translation in 1965. The only other book published by Auerbach in his Yale years is Typologische Motive in der mittelalterlichen Literatur (Cologne: Petrarca-Institut, 1953), a work not really concerned with “rhetoric” and probably so arcane that even Kernan did not know about it.

57. Originally published in short form in Critical Inquiry 3 (1976): 439–47; and expanded and printed in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Seabury, 1979). I use the version as it appears in Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, eds., Critical Theory Since 1965 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1986), pp. 452–68.

58. See the discussion above, in n. 35.

59. The book in question is La preuve par l’étymologie (Paris, 1953), with Jameson quoting from p. 12.

60. Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 6.

61. See Haun Saussy, “Writing in the Odyssey: Eurykleia, Parry, Jousse, and the Opening of Letter from Homer,” Arethusa 29 (1996): 299–338, esp. the discussion on pp. 300–304. Even Saussy cannot discuss this passage without reference to Auerbach (p. 302), whose observations find themselves pressed into the service of enhancing Saussy’s largely deconstructive reading (that is, that writing is already present in the oral epic).

62. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. Ed. H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1971), 1:27, lines 1–10.

1. See Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), especially the capsule biographies of the “300 Notable Emigrés” that close the volume (pp. 675–718). Among more recent books, see Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America: From the 1930s to the Present (New York: Viking, 1983); Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Still valuable for its firsthand accounts is W. Rex Crawford, ed., The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), with contributions by Franz Neumann, Henri Peyre, Erwin Panofsky, Wolfgang Köhler, and Paul Tillich. For a German perspective on this history, see Helge Pross, Die deutsche akademische Emigration nach den Vereinigsten Staaten, 1933–1941 (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1955).

2. See Liselotte Dieckmann, “Akademische Emigranten in der Türkei,” in Verbannung: Aufzeichnungen deutscher Schriftsteller im Exil, ed. Egon Schwarz and Matthias Wegner (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1964), pp. 122–26.

3. See the information in the capsule biographies of these figures and the corresponding discussions in the essays in The Intellectual Migration.

4. H. Stuart Hughes, “Franz Neumann Between Marxism and Liberal Democracy,” in Intellectual Migration, p. 449.

5. Franz Neumann, “The Social Sciences,” in The Cultural Migration, p. 19. This passage is discussed in Jean Matter Mandler and George Mandler, “The Diaspora of Experimental Psychology,” in Intellectual Migration, p. 379.

6. Quoted in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, introduction to The Intellectual Migration, p. 7.

7. Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930–41, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

8. For a complete production history of the film and a review of some of its sources and early responses, see the special issue of Cinefantastique 8 (1979): 1–2.

9. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet, 1950), p. 45.

10. In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 17:218–56. The essay originally appeared in German in Imago 5 (1919): 297–324.

11. See Henry L. Minton, Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in Psychological Testing (New York: New York University Press, 1988), esp. p. 265:

12. See Linda Dowling, “Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language,” PMLA 97 (1982): 160.

13. “Development of a Method,” in Leo Spitzer: Representative Essays, ed. Alban Forcione, Herbert Lindenberger, and Madeline Sutherland (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 448.

14. “The Formation of the American Humanist,” PMLA 66 (1951): 47; emphases mine.

15. Auerbach to Binswanger, March 3, 1930, quoted and translated in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress’: Erich Auerbach’s Everydays,” in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 23–24. I am grateful to Professor Gumbrecht for providing me with a copy of the original German letter. Gumbrecht considers this a “caricature,” and his extended assay in providing a more textured portrait of the critic is Leo Spitzers Stil (Tübingen: Narr, 2001).

16. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Der Sandman,” in Sämtliche poetischen Werke (Berlin: Tempel, 1963), pp. 612–13

17. W. J. Stuart, Forbidden Planet (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1956), p. 35.

18. John Freccero, foreword to Leo Spitzer: Representative Essays, p. xii.

19. Paul Zumthor, Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. Sarah White (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), p. 21. For another portrait in contrasts, see Harry Levin, “Two Romanisten in America: Spitzer and Auerbach,” in Intellectual Migration, pp. 463–84.

20. Auerbach’s picture appears as the frontispiece to Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie (Bern: Francke, 1967) and also appears on the cover of Martin Vialon, ed., Erich Auerbachs Briefe an Martin Hellweg (1939–1950) (Tübingen: Francke, 1997). Spitzer’s appears as the frontispiece to Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963). Curtius’s is printed as the frontispiece to Ernst Robert Curtius: Werk, Wirkung, Zukunftsperspectiven, ed. Walter Berschin and Arnold Rothe (Heidelberg: Winter, 1989).

21. Stand und Aufgaben der Sprachwissenschaft: Festschrift für Wilhelm Streitberg (Heidelberg: Winter, 1924); Germanica: Eduard Sievers zum 75. Geburtstage 25. November 1925 (Halle: Niemeyer, 1925); Sprachgeschichte und Wortbedeutung: Festschrift Albert Debrunner gewidmet von Schülern, Freunden und Kollegen (Bern: Francke, 1954).

22. http://sfstation.members.easyspace.com/fbkrel.htm, which reproduces a page of Krell writing, together with an imaginary translation key.

23. Moses Hadas, review of the second edition of Jaeger’s Humanistische Reden und Vorträge, Classical Journal 56 (1960): 284.

24. Stuart, Forbidden Planet, pp. 101–2.

25. “Zur Einführung,” Scripta Minora (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 1960), 1:xxvi.

26. See William H. Jordy, “The Aftermath of the Bauhaus in America: Gropius, Mies, and Breuer,” in Intellectual Migration, pp. 485–544. For an account of Neutra’s modernism, with designs and photographs of homes that recall those of Dr. Morbius, see Esther McCoy, Richard Neutra (New York: Braziller, 1960). Neutra also designed the so-called Chemosphere House, off Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, in 1960; with its saucer-shaped living space and its tall pedestal of a foundation, this striking house became a fixture of early 1960s futurism and appeared frequently in science fiction television of that decade.

27. For details, see Gumbrecht, “‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress.’”

28. “Jede Form vom Emigration verursacht an sich schon unvermeidlicher—weise eine Art von Gleichgewichtsstörung…. [I]ch mich nie mehr ganz als mit mir zusammengehörig empfand. Etwas von der natürlichen Identität mit meinem ursprünglichen und eigentlichen Ich blieb für immer zerstört” (quoted as the epigraph to A. B. Malgarini, “Werner Jaeger in the United States,” in Werner Jaeger Reconsidered, ed. W. M. Calder III [Atlanta: Scholars, 1992], p. 107; my translation).