Classical Scholarship and Its History

From the Renaissance to the Present. Essays in Honour of Christopher Stray

Stephen Harrison, Christopher Pelling, Stephen Harrison, Christopher Pelling

• Verlag: De Gruyter
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110719321
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism

It is unusual for a single scholar practically to reorient an entire sub-field of study, but this is what Chris Stray has done for the history of UK classical scholarship. His remarkable combination of interests in the sociology of scholars and scholarship, in the history of the book and of publishing, and (especially) in the detailed intellectual contextualisation of classical scholarship as a form of classical reception has fundamentally changed the way the history of British classics and its study is viewed.

A generation ago the history of classical scholarship still consisted largely of accounts of particular scholars and groups of scholars written by other scholars from a broadly biographical and 'heroic individual' perspective. In these works scholars often sought to find their own place in the great tradition, choosing to praise or blame those whose work they admired or deprecated, and to identify with particular schools or trends, and there were few attempts to provide a broader and less prosopographical perspective.

Almost all the chapters in the volume originated as papers at a conference in honour of the honorand, and have been improved both by discussion there and by the rigorous peer-review process conducted by the two experienced editors. It covers various aspects of classical reception, with a particular focus on the history of scholars, their institutions, and their writings; the main focus is on the UK, but there are also substantial engagements with continental Europe and (especially) the USA; the period covered runs from the Renaissance to the present. The cast contains a number of world-famous names. Unusually, the volume also contains an essay by the honorand, but we are very keen to include this, especially as it focusses on the topic of scholarly collaboration.

Part I: Orientation and Origins

Tracking Classical Scholarship: Myth, Evidence and Epistemology

Lorna Hardwick

The past is rubbish till scholars take the pains

to sift and sort and interpret the remains.

This chaos is the past, mounds of heaped debris

just waiting to be organised into history.

Harrison 1990, 79

Memory runs a marathon, a human mind relay

From century to century to recreate our play.

Memory, mother of the Muses, frees

from oblivion the ‘Ichneftes’ of Sophocles.

Harrison 1990, xxii

As so often over the years my starting point for a new project is the result of a jog supplied by Chris Stray.¹ He has identified a gap in research and thinking and has pointed me to ‘the part played in the transmission of classical culture by scholarship and teaching’, which is ‘but rarely reflected in the pages of the journals and monographs devoted to classical reception studies’ (Stray 2018a, xv). The theory and practice of classical scholarship, including classical reception, is a huge field. The history of scholarship is now increasingly recognised as an area that is not only important for analysing classical receptions and classical traditions but is also a necessary tool in reflecting on research and teaching in any aspect of classics and ancient history. Scholarship is itself a ‘reception’ practice that in its turn shapes all parts of the field. Stray’s comments prompt investigation of norms, modes of communication, measures of authority and means of persuasion that have shaped the interpretation of texts, the development of the study of ancient Greece and Rome, and its role in wider cultural and intellectual histories.

The histories of classical scholarship present a challenging mix of systemic assumptions, paradoxes and shifts in values, epistemology and practice, some of which are openly proclaimed, some of which are assumed, and some of which lurk beneath the surface. All scholarship has cultural parameters and norms. Historically, these have usually been based on aspirations to objectivity and emotional neutrality. Modern scholarship also includes but is not confined to the currently prominent categories of gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity. ‘Engaged’ scholarship is a slightly fuzzy concept that nods commitment to values that are thought to extend beyond the subject area itself. However, comparatively little attention has been given to investigating how and why research questions are formed, how questions shape research methods and how scholars persuade others that the questions are important and the judgements convincing. How are colleagues, students and readers to be persuaded, rather than drilled and dragooned? Looking at these processes in no way implies ‘bad faith’ on behalf of scholars, merely an acknowledgement that very few scholarly ‘truths’ are self-evident and that sometimes scholars do not explain how they have arrived at the questions that frame their investigations and hence shape the conclusions.

In this short essay I shall try to put a toe in the water of this ocean by focusing on issues around personal voice scholarship, identity scholarship and modes of persuasion. In the closing section I will move outward to suggest how it might be possible to build on those analyses and will make some suggestions about the future role of classical scholarship, both within the field of classics and in the wider public sphere. I hope this tentative exploration may lead to some future discussion.

****

Where better to start than with a quotation from Stray’s most recent book, his collection of essays Classics in Britain: Scholarship, Education and Publishing 1800–2000 (Stray 2018a). Chapter 16 of this book is an essay on ‘Edward Adolf Sonnenschein and the Politics of Linguistic Authority in England, 1880–1930’. As with many of Stray’s essays, it was published in a cross-disciplinary collection that might have escaped the attention of classicists. It is structured round an argument that is richly informed by evidence from archives and publications dating from the time under consideration. It also exemplifies the importance of the critical evaluation of evidence in building a bridge between the ‘case-study’ and the bigger picture.

In a section of the essay headed Grammatical Terminology and the Politics of Knowledge, Stray addressed issues of academic ideology that were involved in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century construction of a university curriculum of separate specialist subjects. He argued that what was created was an ‘idea that any subject, studied in the search for truth, had a moral worth’ (Stray 2018a, 301). I am preaching to the converted when I say that in these days of instrumentalism and blurring of the distinctions between education and training, classicists are at the forefront of those who argue that intellectual acuity and integrity, underpinned by the weighing of evidence and of arguments and especially by the exposure of weak arguments and untruth, is the prime aim of education at all levels.

This is a noble aspiration, but the rhetoric is easier than the practice. I need to probe a little at the interfaces between the study of antiquity, conceptualisation, judgement and anachronism. As a graduate student, I had the good fortune to spend some time supervised by Moses Finley.² The initial six months were, to put it mildly, somewhat gruelling. I remember in particular one session in which I made the mistake of mouthing the then fashionable mantra about the difference between ancient and modern concepts (in particular between status groups and class categories; such distinctions underlay Finley’s research on slavery). I then spent a challenging couple of hours being grilled about how concepts were generated and how they might be tested. I was made to reflect on the difference between sources and evidence and to give examples of the questions that sources must bear before they could be regarded as providing evidence. There followed an inquisition about the ways in which scholars alighted on questions (including the personal and social histories involved) and how they formulated questions and tested the results. It seems to me that not only historians of scholarship but also any practising classicist or ancient historian faces similar challenges today.

Scholars aspire (and I do not denigrate the role of aspiration in scholarship, as in life). They aspire to validate and vindicate in some way the importance of studying antiquity. They aspire to share in the gravitas of scholarship and also to wield its spotlights without fear or favour. They aspire to spread knowledge of the texts, ideas and material cultures of Greece and Rome in ways that both honour the ancient cultures and also inculcate critical thinking about antiquity and about subsequent times and places. Scholars face particular challenges because the worlds of antiquity and the present day are multi-faceted, culturally and politically, and are both distant and in various metaphorical and material ways still present. Attempts to engage with these problems without attention to the histories of scholarship and to the interaction between scholarship and the public imagination are surely doomed.

****

A look at some recent debates is salutary. There has been a certain amount of reflection on the perspectives that frame scholarly enquiry, the types of authority that they imply and the language of scholarship and its communications. A good example is the recognition of Personal Voice scholarship. This has surely exploded the assumption that the scholar has or could have a professional carapace insulated from his/ her own life experiences, let alone that this would be a desirable state. Perspectives of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, physical and mental states are recognised as infusing critical thinking.

Judith Hallett, a pioneer in that field, has followed the lead of Nancy Miller and categorized the Personal Voice as entailing an ‘explicitly autobiographical performance within the act of criticism’ (Hallett 2001, 134). Hallett also aimed to situate this mode of self-expression within a larger intellectual framework. She has noted that individual biographies draw on lived experiences — for example as immigrants or children of refugee parents, Holocaust survivors, people of faith (Jews, Christians).³ Ground-breaking work by Hallett and Van Nortwick related the personal voice to style as well as to content and was instrumental in the recognition that powerfully felt emotions were important drivers of scholarship (Hallett and Van Nortwick 1997). The essays collected by Hallett and Van Nortwick also stressed the value of personal voice scholarship for the analysis and interpretation of Greek and Latin texts and their reception in various historical and cultural contexts and raised questions about the personal and professional implications of writing in a personal voice, which would be judged by sometimes hostile peers. To the issues they raised I would add the value of considering covert as well as overt aspects of the personal voice, which after all was not first invented in 1997. This repays some detective work, not only in respect of literary scholarship but also to search out ways in which personal voices can be embedded in historiography and commentaries. The kinds of questions asked by scholars — the underlying as well as the prominent — also shape the methods used and the tones and registers in which judgements are communicated. The personal voice analysis developed in the last quarter of the twentieth century by Hallett and van Nortwick and their collaborators provides an important benchm...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• Part I: Orientation and Origins
• Part II: Early Modern
• Part III: Victorian Cambridge and Oxford
• Part IV: History of the Book/Commentary
• Part V: International Connections
• Part VI: Academic Practices
• List of Contributors
• Index