Philology, Renaissance

Abstract

Philology (from the ancient Greek φίλος “love” and λόγος “word”) is a branch of literary criticism that studies languages in written sources. Classical philology is concerned with the study of literary texts written in Latin and ancient Greek and originated in the libraries of Alexandria in the fourth century BCE. After a marked blossoming in the first century, this discipline suffered a slow but unstoppable process of decay throughout late antiquity and Middle Ages. Italian scholars in the late thirteenth century resumed this critical approach and sharpened its tools. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, they had many emended editions of ancient texts previously thought to be lost and helped make them available to European scholars (see Contini 1977 Pasquali, Filologia e storia. Firenze: Le Monnier, 1920, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo. Firenze: Le Monnier, 1934; Peck, A history of classical philology from the seventh century B.C. to the twentieth century A.D. New York: Macmillan, 1911; Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and scholars. A guide to the transmission of Greek and Latin literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968; Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann. Firenze: Le Monnier, 1963; Turner, Philology: The forgotten origins of modern humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).