Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology: A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, 1798-1948 (Making the Middle Ages) [Annotated] 2503510868, 9782503510866

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MAKIN G THE MIDDL E AGES VOLUME 3 THE CENTRE FOR MEDIEVAL STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

Editorial Board Geraldine Bames (University of Sydney) Margaret Clunies Ross (University of Sydney) Penelope Gay (University of Sydney) David Matthews (University of Newcastle, Australia) Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne)

Advisory Board Jürg Glauser (Universities of Zürich and Basel) Stephen Knight (University of Wales, Cardiff) Ulrich Müller (University of Salzburg) Russell Poole (Massey University, New Zealand) Tom Shippey (Saint Louis University) Richard Utz (University ofNorthem Iowa) Kathleen Verduin (Hope College, Michigan)

Series Editors Geraldine Bames (University of Sydney) Margaret Clunies Ross (University of Sydney)

Editorial Assistant Simon French

Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, 1793 -1948

Richard Utz

BREPOLS

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Utz, Richard J., 1961Chaucer and the discourse of German philology : a history of reception and an annotated bibliography of studies, 1793-1948. - (Making the Middle Ages; 3) !.Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1340?-1400 - Criticism and interpretation 2.Narrative poetry, English (Middle) - Historiography 3.Criticism Germany- History 4.Criticism - Germany- Bibliography I.Title 821.1 ISBN 2503510868

© 2002, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium

Ail rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

D/200210095150 ISBN 2-503-51086-8 Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper.

Contents Abbreviations .................................................................................... ix Pre face

Xlll

Philology vs. Enthusiasm ................................................................... 1 2

Literary Enthusiasm, 'Pre-March' Nationalism, and Nascent Scientism: 1793-1848

3

Toward Philological Discourse: 1849-1870 ................................... .41

4

The Age of Chaucerphilulugie: Institutionalization, Hegemonic Expansion, and Decline (1871-1932) .......................... 61 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

5

The Founding Fathers: Julius Zupitza and Bernhard ten Brink .................................................................. 73 German Philologists and their British Counterparts: Bradshaw, Skeat, and Fumivall ............................................. 103 Philology's Man in Palo Alto: Ewald Flügel's Mission lmpossible ................................................................ 127 Ceterum Re-Censeo: John Koch, the School Teacher ........... 159 Duelling Philologists: Viktor Langhans vs. Hugo Lange ...... 191

New Enthusiasms and Philology's Longevity: 1933-1948 ........... 205 Annotated Bibliography ................................................................. 253 1793 - 1848 1849 - 1870 1871 - 1932 1933-1948

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Abbreviations 1. General Abbreviations Addit. Anon. ed. edn edns ModE ModF ModG Habil. Lat Late ME ME MHG MLA MLat ModE MS MSS n.s. OE O.S.

publ. Rev. rev. TOC trans. transs.

Additional Anonymous edited edition editions Modem English Modem French Modem German Habilitation(= post-doctoral dissertation) Latin Late Middle English Middle English Middle High German Modem Language Association of America Medieval Latin Modem English manuscript manuscripts New Series OldEnglish Old Series published Review revised Table of Contents translated ! translation translations

X

2. Abbreviations for Publications Anglia Anglia Beiblatt Archiv Die Neueren Sprachen

EETS Englische Studien

Lit[t] eraturblatt NED PMLA OED Speculum YWES

Anglia: Zeitschrift far englische Philologie Anglia Beiblatt: Mitteilungen über englische Sprache und englischen Unterricht Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen Die Neueren Sprachen: Zeitschrift far Forschung und Unterricht auf dem Fachgebiet der modernen Fremdsprachen Early English Text Society Englische Studien: Organ für englische Philologie unter Mitberücksichtigung des englischen Unterrichts auf hOheren Schulen Lit[t} eraturblatt far germanische und romanische Philologie New English Dictionary Publications of the Modern Language Association ofAmerica Oxford English Dictionary Speculum. A Journal ofMedieval Studies The Year's Work in English Studies

3. Abbreviations of Chaucerian Texts ABC Adam Ane/ Astr Bal Campi BD Bo Buk CkT C!T Compl d'Am

An ABC Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn Anelida and Arcite A Treatise on the Astrolabe A Balade of Complaint The Book of the Duchess Boece Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton The Cook's Tale The Clerk's Tale Complaynt D 'Amours

Abbreviations CT CYT Equat For FormAge FranT FrT Gent GP HF KnT Lady LGW LGWP ManT Mars Mel MercB MerT MilT MkT MLT NPT PardT ParsT PF PhyT Pity Prov PrT Purse Rom Ros RvT Scog ShT SNT SqT

Xl

The Canterbury Tales The Canon 's Yeoman 's Tale The Equatorie of the Planetis Fortune The Former Age The Franklin 's Tale The Friar 's Tale Gentilesse General Prologue The House of Fame The Knight's Tale A Complaynt to his Lady The Legend of Good Women Prologue to the Legend ofGood Women The Manciple 's Tale The Complaint of Mars The Tale of Melibee Merci/es Beaute The Merchant's Tale The Miller 's Tale The Monk's Tale The Man of Law 's Tale The Nun 's Priest's Tale The Pardoner 's Tale The Farsan 's Tale The Parliament of Fowls The Physician 's Tale The Complaint unto Pity Proverbs Prioress 's Tale The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse The Romaunt of the Rose Ta Rosemounde The Reeve 's Tale Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan The Shipman 's Tale The Second Nun 's Tale The Squire 's Tale

Xll

Sted SumT Th TC Tru th Ven WBT WBP WumNob Wom Une

Lak of Stedfastnesse The Summoner's Tale Tale of Sir Thopas Trailus and Criseyde Tru th The Complaint of Venus The Wife of Bath 's Tale Prologue to the Wife ofBath 's Tale Womanly Noblesse Against Women Unconstant

Pre face Other nations may have contributed important preliminary work; however, if the higher philology should ever develop into a perfect whole, such a palin-genesis could only happen in Germany. Friedrich Nicolai, Sebaldus Nothanker (1774) Had it not already existed, I believe that the Germans would have invented pedantry. [ ... ] Pedantry is to resist obstinately about minutiae and to overlook that we are - at the same time - losing out on great profit; this is why the pedant in comedies always !oses the bride he woos. For the new, he has only faultfinding and no enthusiasm; for the traditional he has only numb palliation, but no desire to get to the bottom ofit. Pedantic means [... ]: to rely like the schoolmaster on the mie established by scholarship or like the pupil on the rule he has been taught, and not to see the tree before the forest. Jacob Grimm, 'Über das Pedantische in der Deutschen Sprache' (184 7) What I am suggesting, then, is that universities must find room for a philologically oriented medieval studies not despite but because of its intractable penchant for pedantry, its Sitzjleisch, its fascination with the difficult, the obscure, and the esoteric. Nor must that room be a dusty closet into which only the theoretically backward and critically obtuse are hidden away. Lee Patterson 'The Return to Philology' (1994)

A

bout 10 years ago, when preparing my Curriculum Vitae to apply for positions at North American universities, 1 tried to find a good translation for my doctoral degree in 'Englische und Deutsche Philologie'. While a literai variant, 'English and German philology', sounded acceptable to me, 1 realized after some research that such a field denominator was simply not used across the Atlantic and settled for 'English and German language and literature'. Already in 1985-1986, when spending a 'year abroad' at Williams College, I had realized that my professors there never called themselves 'philologists' or referred to their

XIV

scholarship as 'philology', while in Germany 1 had often encountered those terms both inside and outside of academic contexts. After 1 had found a position at the University of Northem Iowa, 1 began to inquire into the causes of these differences in terminology. By trial and error, 1 understood that introducing myself as a philologist to my North American colleagues would either make some ofthem see me as an anti-theoretical, conservative, dusty drudge, while others would regard me as an especially thorough, diligent, and serious scholar. Such paradoxical reactions, a reading of Gerald Graff's fascinating institutional history of English studies in the U.S., Professing Literature, and my increasing familiarity with Leslie Workman's paradigm of 'medievalism', encouraged me to delve deeper into the history of English medieval studies in Germany. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chaucer reception evolved as the most promising area of investigation because 1 could combine my interest in the medieval poet with the ongoing search for my own scholarly identity. Even a cursory look at the existing research on this topic convinced me that neither the disciplinary archaeology of English Medieval studies in Germany nor German Chaucer reception had been the focus of extensive investigations. From 1996 to 1998, when several forward-looking adrninistrators at the University of Northem Iowa allowed me to pursue Joerg Fichte's kind invitation to teach and research Medieval English studies at the University of Tübingen, 1 used the excellent library holdings there to establish a substantial working bibliography, read some of the existing work on the history of German English studies, and studied some of the seminal texts by German scholars in Classical, German, Romance, and English studies on the subject of 'philology'. During my stay at Tübingen, 1 received support from the College of Neuphilologie through two mini-grants to study the biography and works of Bernhard ten Brink and Ewald Flügel. ln the meantime, Brepols Publishers, in collaboration with the University of Sydney Centre for Medieval Studies had begun an exciting new book series, entitled Making the Middle Ages, for which 1 co-edited (with Tom Shippey) the first volume, Medievalism in the Modern World, a Festschrift honouring Leslie Workman, in 1998. Geraldine Bames and Brepols's Simon Forde encouraged me to propose a book on German Chaucer reception for the new series. After my retum to Iowa, and further aided in my project by a 'Faculty Development Grant' from the College of Humanities and Fine Arts (1999-2000) and a generous eight-week 'Summer Grant' (June/July 2000) from the UNI Graduate College, 1 came to the conclusion that my goal of

Preface

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presenting a case study of the development of modem philological practices by examining the reception history of German Chaucer studies could only be accomplished by adding an annotated bibliography to the substantial narrative sections. With hindsight, 1 realize that the decision to add that bibliography might be my own feeble attempt at emulating the strong encyclopaedic streak among the very philologists 1 shall be discussing. Moreover, it may also be telling that the chapter on Ewald Flügel, a German philologist who moved to the United States, became one of the longest sections of my investigation. Thus, there can be no doubt that this monograph mirrors several major facets and fascinations of my own scholarly career. The bibliography attempts to present a complete overview of scholarship for the most part by German-speaking (i.e., German, Austrian and, in a few cases, Swiss) scholars on Geoffrey Chaucer produced between 1793 (the year in which the first comprehensive, scholarly entry on Chaucer, written by Johann Joachim Eschenburg, appeared in print) and 1948 (the year in which Ernst Robert Curtius' s influential Europaische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter was published). While most of the publications described here are what Anglophone scholars would call 'critical studies', 1 have also included reviews, editions of texts, textbooks for schools, translations, histories of English literature, popular narrativizations, and several texts (mostly obituaries, memoirs, and bibliographie essays) about important Chaucerians published during the period under investigation to demonstrate the extent of modem German academic interest in the Middle English poet. While about seventy per cent of the titles read and catalogued for this study would be available for Chaucerians in the existing bibliographies on the early periods of Chaucer scholarship, the large number of factual errors and the absence of consistent (or any) annotations in those bibliographies convinced me that an extensive re-evaluation of these earlier publications was a desideratum. In addition, bibliographers working before the days of world-wide interlibrary loan services and the accessibility of library catalogues via the internet (1 am thinking especially of the highly efficient Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue and FirstSearch) often depended on the indexes of joumals, tried to err on the side of inclusion, and thus added any and all page numbers and titles, even if many such entries only mentioned Chaucer's name. Moreover, some of the twentiethcentury Chaucer bibliographers (e.g., Dudley David Griffith) looked upon Chaucer studies as representative of medieval studies in general and often

XVl

recorded publications, for example, W. Kuchler's essay, 'Griselda und Grishildur', Die Neueren Sprachen 33 (1925), 354-57, E. Peter's Der griechische Physiologus und seine orientalischen Quellen, or O. Funke's Middle English Reader: Texts from the 12th ta the l 4th Century, which do not contain or negotiate any Chauceriana whatsoever. 1 have eliminated such excesses and limited my own entries to those studies which are clearly related to research on Geoffrey Chaucer and the contexts of his biography and works. Studies of analogues to Chaucerian motifs, etc., have only been included if there was specific reference to Chaucer, and exclusively literary/creative uses of Chaucer in literary texts as, for example, in Johann Ludwig Tieck's novella, Des Lebens Übeifluss, have not been recorded at all (but can be located in volume III of Caroline Spurgeon's Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion). The only areas where 1 have gone beyond most earlier bibliographies is in my inclusion of literary histories, textbooks for schools, and studies which investigate the reception of Chaucer and Chaucerian texts in post-medieval times. Like most of my predecessors, 1 make mention of those doctoral dissertations (and several other publications) on Chaucer which were written and published by Anglophone scholars under the aegis of a German thesis advisor and at a German university. In the case of E. Perréaz Des Transformations du langage en Angleterre. Les Origines (1873) 1 may have erred on the side of inclusion because of the unusual multi-lingual and multi-cultural perspective it offers. Friedrich (Frederick) Klaeber's and Ewald Flügel's Chauceriana have also been included even after they took positions at institutions in the United States. Their education in Germany and at German universities as well as their understanding of philology clearly show them in continuous agreement with German philological (and national) discourses. Similarly, Bernhard (Barend) ten Brink, although bom in Rolland, but educated in Germany and conscious participant in the cultural annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, undoubtedly belongs among the group of scholars discussed as the 'founding fathers' of German Chaucerphilologie in chapter 4.1. The moderately annotated bibliography has two main objectives: first and foremost, it is meant as an additional source of information on the history of German Chaucer reception presented in the individual chapters of this investigation. While the narrative of my study centres on what 1 consider several of the representative developments in Chaucerphilologie, the accompanying bibliographie entries are supposed to substantiate my

Preface

XVll

selective meta-critical readings by providing a full survey of the Germanspeaking discourse on Chaucer between 1793 and 1948. My second goal with this bibliography is to extricate various older studies from the habit of neglect and omission which has increasingly marginalized most nonAnglophone Chaucer criticism, especially since the two World Wars. In my experience, many an original thought and many a remarkable scholarly dispute have been branded 'obsolescent' by subsequent continuist perspectives in Chaucer studies. Thus, 1 hope that easier access to these older studies should not only assist readers in digging deeper into the archaeology of our discipline, but even supply valuable information for some contemporary and future readings of Chaucerian texts. My work on the bibliography was helped immensely by the earlier summaries of Chaucer criticism (such as the various surveys by John Koch, and Albert C. Baugh's 'Fifty Years of Chaucer Scholarship', 1951), by the encyclopaedic efforts of German and other philologists to collect al! existing and emerging information in their fields in joumals and review joumals (especially: Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie (founded 1878), Anglia Beiblatt: Mitteilungen über englische Sprache und englischen Unterricht (1890-1944), Übersicht über die [ . .] auf dem Gebiete der englischen Philologie erschienenen Bücher, Schriften und Aufsatze (Supplement!Beigabe zur Anglia, 1894-1907), Anglia Anzeiger (18781885; not al! volumes were accessible), Archiv fardas Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen [founded 1846], Englische Studien: Organ für englische Philologie unter Mitberücksichtigung des englischen Unterrichts auf hoheren Schulen (1877-1944), Jahrbuch für romanische und englische Sprache und Literatur (1859-1871; N.S. 1874-1876), Literaturblatt für germanische und romanische Philologie (1880-1944), Die Neueren Sprachen: Zeitschrift far F orschung und Unterricht auf dem F achgebiet der modernen Fremdsprachen (1893-1945), etc.), regular bibliographie reports (e.g., Jahresbericht über die Erscheinungen auf dem Gebiete der germanischen Philologie (1879-1954), Johannes Martin's Systematisches Verzeichnis der Programmabhandlungen, Dissertationen und Habilitationen aus dem Gebiete der romanischen und englischen Philologie sowie der allgemeinen Sprach- und Litteraturwissenschaft und der Padagogik und Methodik (1893), Bibliographischer Monatsbericht über neu-erschienene Schul-, Universitats- und Hochschulschriften (1889-1942), The Year's Work in English Studies (founded 1919) or encyclopaedic collections of information (e.g., Gustav Kôrting's Grundriss der Geschichte

xvm der englischen Litteratur, 1887 (several revisions and reprints); Carl Elze's Grundriss der englischen Philologie (1887; 2nd edn 1889); Alois Brandl's essay, 'Mittelenglische Literatur', in Paul's Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, 1893; and especially John Koch's essay, 'Mittelenglische Litteratur', in Ergebnisse und Fortschritte der germanistischen Wissenschaft, 1902). 1 compared most of the data provided in these publications with the invaluable references given in Eleanor Hammond's magisterial Chaucer: A Bibliographie Manual (1908), Caroline Spurgeon's leamed list of German Chaucer criticism in vol. III of her Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1357-1900 (1925), the Chaucer bibliographies by Dudley David Griffith (1926, 1955), Willard E. Martin (1935), Marjory Joy Robineau (1948), Elisha Boyd Page (1949), Albert C. Baugh (1968; 2nd edition 1977), John Fisher and Mark Allen (1987), and consulted several volumes from the Toronto Chaucer Bibliography series and from the Variorum Chaucer. The foundational importance of the work on the history of English studies in Germany by Thomas Finkenstaedt, Gunta Haenicke and several other members of the 'Augsburg school' will be obvious from both the text and the footnotes of this investigation. The only example of a detailed and thorough, specialized investigation of the early phase in the history of German English studies, Renate Haas's V A. Huber, S. ]manuel und die Formationsphase der deutschen Anglistik (1990), proved to be a reliable source of information as well as a model of interdisciplinary methodology. Through the excellent and ever-friendly help of the staffmembers at the Interlibrary Loan and Reference Services of the Donald O. Rod Library at the University ofNorthem Iowa and additional assistance from librarians at the Stadtbibliothek Cham and the Universities of Regensburg, Freiburg, Marburg, Tübingen, Vienna, and Berkeley, I was able to work with the originals or at least copied versions of almost all the texts contained in this bibliography. From the ranks of these specialists, Barbara Allen (UNI), Rebecca Berg (UNI), Linda Bemeking (UNI), Monika Dietz (Marburg) Elisabeth Golzar (Austrian National Library, Vienna) Evelyn Fellner (Cham), Linda McLaury (UNI), Angelika Reich (Regensburg), Matthias Reifegerste (Freiburg), Edith Schmidbauer (Cham) deserve particular mention for going beyond the call of duty. To my mother, Hildegard Utz, 1 am indebted for ordering and copying many a text arriving at the Stadtbibliothek Cham from libraries all over Germany. I would also like to recognize the support I received from my student assistants at the

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University of Tübingen (Tat Titslikis) and the University of Northem Iowa (Olga Kostareva and Tina Shaw) who helped me with accessing and copying many titles. And I am grateful to Joerg Fichte (Tübingen) and Renate Haas (Kiel) for helping me get access to some particularly rare titles. It is because of all the support I had that there remain only very few cases in which have I not been able to locate texts. Those instances are indicated as 'inaccessible' under the respective entries. Any errors or lacunae in the often-revised bibliography are, of course, entirely my responsibility. Finally, I should like to say a word about the tone and structure of this bibliography: the annotations are not those of the proverbial Johnsonian 'harrnless drudge' who would only record facts. While I would like to think that I have made an honest attempt at writing the short entries 'sine ira et studio', certain publications - usually the ones inclusive of scveral different research paradigms - engaged my scholarly interest more than others, and I admit to spending more time and energy describing those seminal texts in the history of philological Chaucer reception that proved particularly helpful in understanding and writing that history. In order to create a chronological picture of the genesis and development of German Chaucerphilologie I have arranged all bibliographie entries by year of publication, and - within each given year - alphabetically by authors' or editors' names. In the case of several publications by the same author within a given year, book-length texts are given priority over essay- and reviewlength ones. Ail reviews of English titles by German reviewers are included as individual publications; all Anglophone and international (non-German) reviews of German publications are listed as part of the entry of those publications. The annotated bibliography has been divided into four sections, each of which is meant to complete the narratives of the four periods of German-speaking Chaucer studies recognized and discussed by the study. This book has profited from numerous comments by medievalist colleagues and friends from all over the world at different points in time. The ideas brought together in the volume have been tested at the Anglistentag 2001 (University of Vienna), the 1997 (Canterbury Christ Church College), 1998 (Wells College), 1999 (Montana State University), and 2000 (Hope College) international general conferences on medievalism; the 1997 and 2001 international medieval congresses at W estem Michigan University; the 1995 (Chicago) and 1998 (San Francisco) meetings of the Modem Language Association of America; the 1999 international medieval

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congress at the University of Leeds, the 1996 conference of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University; the 1996 (UCLA) and 2000 (London) meetings of the New Chaucer Society; and the 1995 Paris colloquium on 'L'Europe des politesses et le caractère des nations', sponsored by the Université Blaise Pascal and the International Comparative Literature Association. While the published academic work which assisted me in writing this book is acknowledged in the footnotes and the 'General Bibliography', it is through the various persona! conversations and commmücations with Christoph Bode (University of Munich), William Calin (University of Florida), Joerg Fichte (University of Tübingen), AnnaChristina Giovanopoulos (University of Dresden), Renate Haas (University of Kiel), Rüdiger Hartmann (Klinkhardt Publishers), Frank-Rutger Hausmann (University of Freiburg), Anne-Françoise Le Lostec (UNI), Dieter Mehl (University of Bonn), David Metzger (Old Dominion University), Gwendolyn Morgan (Montana State University), Ulrich Müller (University of Salzburg), Gerhard Obermeier (Gemeinde Atzbach, Upper Austria), Nils Holger Petersen (University of Copenhagen), Tom Shippey (St. Louis University), Barbara Sargent-Baur (University of Pittsburgh), Johannes Six (Benediktinerstift Lambach), Jesse Swan (UNI), Kathleen Verduin (Hope College), the late Leslie Workman (Studies in Medievalism), and numerous others that the work on this project has corne to fruition. Without their collegial comments, support, friendship, and love, 1 could not have carried out my task. A special word of thanks goes to Kathleen Verduin, most unselfish of friends, whose gracious recensio, emendatio, and divinatio saved me, the non-native speaker, from committing too many trespasses against English grammar, style, and usage; to Geraldine Bames and Margaret Clunies Ross (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Sydney), for their various critical suggestions; to Simon Forde, whose patient trust in my powers to complete this book kept me from getting too nervous about extending several agreed-upon deadlines; and to Simon French (University of Sydney) for his expert work on the editing and production of the volume. Parts of chapters 1, 3, and 4.2 appeared in Studies in Medievalism 12 (2001); part of chapter 4.4 in 'And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.' Studies on Language and Literature in Honour of Professor Dr. Karl Heinz Goller (2001); and parts of chapter 5 in Medievalism in the Modern World. Essays in Honour of Leslie Workman (1998), Studies in Medievalism VIII (1997), and Mœurs et images, études d'imago/agie européenne (1997); 1 am

Preface

XXI

grateful to the editors of these publications for granting me permission to reuse material. Cedar Falls, Iowa, 26 December 2001

Chapter 1

Philology vs. Enthusiasm: Introductory Perspectives [W]e may suspect that there is in ail soc1et1es, with great consistency, a kind of gradation among discourses: those which are said in the ordinary course of days and exchanges, and which vanish as soon as they have been pronounced; and those which give rise to a certain number of new speech acts which take them up, transform them or speak of them, in short, those discourses which, over and above their formulation, are said indefinitely, remain said, and are to be said again. Michel Foucault (1971) Philology has never really perished. Friedrich Schlegel (1797) Profound ideological issues were at the center of this dry-as-dust philology, and continue to be. Lee Patterson ( 1994)

O

n 17 June 1872, Ulrike von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff wrote a letter to her son, a recent Dr. phil. in Classical philology, expressing her concem about the possible consequences of his published attack against a professor and Chair of Classical philology in Basel, one Friedrich Nietzsche. The young Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorff, who would go on to become one of the most famous figureheads of philology world-wide, had published a long, sardonic invective reviewing Nietzsche's Geburt der Tragodie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1871), and his mother shows herself seriously afraid that Nietzsche might challenge her son to a duel. 1 While 'Frau' Wilamowitz-Moellendorff would be spared the worry of an actual duel, her reaction demonstrates the ' An unpublished letter in the possession of William Mus grave Calder III, cited in Calder's essay, 'The Wilamowitz-Nietzsche Struggle: New Documents and a Reappraisal', Nietzsche-Studien, 12 (1983), 214-54 (pp. 236-37).

2

CHAPTERÜNE

seriousness with which one of the most widely-known academic controversies in the history of modem intellectual thought was negotiated. What had happened was that Nietzsche, in an attempt to describe and grasp the dynamic processes of human creativity, had written a decidedly unphilological account of the psychological motives behind the creation and modifications of Greek drama. In his own words, his study had achieved two major feats: [F]irst, its understanding of the Dionysian phenomenon among the Greeks: for the first time, a psychological analysis of this phenomenon is offered. Secondly, there is the understanding of Socratism; Socrates is recognized for the first time as an instrument of Greek disintegration, as a typical decadent. 'Rationality' against instinct. 'Rationality' at any price as a dangerous force that 2 undermines life.

A host of reasons, including everything from professional disagreement to personal jealousy, has been advanced to explain WilamowitzMoellendorff s quick and negative response in his pamphlet entitled Zukunftsphilologie (1872). That critique as well as Nietzsche's own later description of his book as 'image-mad and image-confused', 'without the will to logical cleanliness', 'disdainful of proof, 'arrogant', and 'rhapsodie' reveals that he had written a study which his academic colleagues in Classical philology had to condemn as extra-discursive because it unacceptably expanded the recognized boundaries of their field. 3 To understand the significance of this late nineteenth-century dispute, a sketch delineating the origins of the two diametrically opposed positions between rational-logical and rhapsodic-imagistic, philologicalphilosophical and artistic-poetic, academic and non-academic ways of knowing, between philology and enthusiasm, will be necessary. Alfred North Whitehead once observed that the entire European philosophical tradition could be described as 'a series of footnotes to 4 Plato' . Whitehead's remark certainly applies to the history of the 2

Ecce Homo, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 271. 3 Nietzsche published this judgment in a prefatory section, 'Attempt at SelfCriticism', in the second (1886) edition of The Birth of Tragedy, cited here from the translation by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random Bouse, 1967), p. 19. 4 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 63.

Philology vs. Enthusiasm

3

antagonism between poetry/art and philosophy/philology as two separate epistemological paths. Plato, usually only quoted for his strict banning of poets from political responsibility in the Republic, orchestrates a discussion of this issue in one of his early dialogues, Ion, in a more conciliatory manner, namely as a disputation between philosopher and rhapsode. 5 Ion has recently retumed from Epidauros, where he has won first prize in the competition among the rhapsodes. Socrates congratulates Ion on his exceptional skills (530b5-c6), and Ion is pleased because he thinks of himself as the best rhapsode and therefore also as the best interpreter of Homer's texts. His authority is challenged, however, as soon as Socrates inquires if Ion can equally well interpret other poets. The rhapsode must admit that his skills are limited to interpreting Homer alone. Socrates concludes that even Ion's understanding of Homer is deficient. When Ion can speak about Homer at all, not an 'Art', that is, not knowledge of the subject matter (techne), is responsible, but a divine power, which 'magnetlike' captivates poet, rhapsode, and audience: because the poets speak these beautiful texts as individuals 'filled with the spirit' or 'enthusiastic ones' (entheoi antes) and 'possessed ones' (katechomenoi), they are 'not in a rational state of mind' (533c9-534a7). 6 Socrates's amphibological compliment, namely that the poets and rhapsodes speak from inspiration and delusion, makes Ion feel uncomfortable. He would prefer that his talents be viewed as a part of general rational thought. Homer, so he reasons, had depicted numerous areas of knowledge and techniques, such as chariot-racing, medicine, arithmetic, fishing, and warfare, so that the rhapsode was knowledgeable in these areas. Socrates rejects this: the chariot-racer knows most about chariot-racing, the doctor most about medicine, and the military strategist most about warfare, etc.; every discipline demanded knowledge known only to the specialist. While only such a specialist was in a position to judge if anything could be leamed from Homer about one of the technai, Ion will have to be content with 5

Ail quotations from and references to Plato's texts are taken from Plata on Poetry, ed. Penelope Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 6 Plato has Socrates also compare poets to Corybantes (korubantiontes, 533e8-

534als), mythical attendants to the Phrygian mother goddess, Cybele, whose cult included wild orgiastic and frenzied dancing. See Penelope Murray, 'Introduction', Plata on Poetry, p. 7: 'Throughout Plato's work the mental state of the inspired poet is described in similar terms: the poet, when composing, is in frenzy and out of his mind; he creates by divine dispcnsation, but not with knowledge'.

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being looked upon as a 'divine man' whose presentation of Homer's epics brings joy to everyone. According to Heinz Schlaffer, Plato's dialogue confronts two ways of thinking, each of which represents a distinctive period in Greek culture: poetry, represented by the rhapsode Ion, is faced with knowledge, represented by Socrates the philosopher. 7 It is not out of persona! hubris that Ion claims to have gained knowledge about everything, but because it was an accepted concept in ancient Greece that poetry taught knowledge. Socrates' s ironie praise cites this communis opinio at the beginning of the dialogue in order to deconstruct it later. Knowledge contained in poetry had become questionable ever since a knowledge independent of poetry had gradually evolved. Plato demonstrates this in two steps: 1. For the various tasks and solutions of the technai a specific human skill is necessary, which would only be confused by the kind of enthusiasm which is the precondition of poetry. Thus, Plato distinguishes between the appearance of knowledge in poetry and the applied science on the basis of the same distinction which is still valid for the modem sciences. 2. The methodological progression of the Socratic questions and distinctions in Ion provides the best example to evidence the independence of theoretical knowledge (episteme), which searches for truth (aletheia), from the poetic knowledge which has its source in higher powers and operates through unconscious forces. Even if no knowledge can be gleaned from poetry, knowledge about poetry is possible. Since rhapsodes are only interpreters of interpreters (535a9), it is the philosopher's task to explain the now unphilosophical essence of poetry. Exactly because he is not possessed by poetic enthusiasm, he is in a position to analyse it. The poet and his rhapsode are incapable of transmitting to others the special meaning of their works, because they have only been inspired for one individual work and perceive 7

Heinz Schlaffer, Poesie und Wissen. Die Entstehung des asthetischen Bewuj3tseins und der philologischen Erkenntnis (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990). In my account of 'enthusiasm' in Classical Greek culture I am condensing Schlaffer's excellent discussion on pp. 11-25 of his study. On the history of the term 'philology' in Greek and Latin texts see Heinrich Kuch's detailed monograph, PHILOLOGOS. Untersuchung eines Wortes von seinem ersten Auftreten in der Tradition bis zur ersten lexikalischen Festlegung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1965), and Gabriël R. F. M. Nuchelmans's Studien über philôlogos, philologia und philologeîn (Zwolle: W. E. J. Tjeenk Willink, 1950).

Philology vs. Enthusiasm

5

others only dimly (532b8-c4). In the Apology, Plato has Socrates express his observation that poets are the least knowledgeable about poetry: [T]he poets did not compose their poems through wisdom, but by nature, and [... ] they were inspired like seers and soothsayers. For these say many fine things, but know nothing of what they say. It seemed to me that poets experienced something similar; at the same time I noticed that because oftheir poetry, they regarded themselves as the wisest of men in other respects also, which they were not. (22b8--c6) 8 A special profession whose task it would have been to speak about poetry did not yet exist; however, the basis for such a profession is implicit in Plato's judgment that non-poets, because they are rational thinkers, know more about poetry than the poets whose enthusiasm had rendered them productive, but not wise and understanding. While the Greek genres of poetry could be experienced according to their specific occasions, themes, and forms, Plato's term 'poetics' (poietike) is a philosophical abstraction. 'The whole' of poetry can only be illuminated by a non-poet. Plato never produces such a complete philosophical lore, let al one 'science' of poetics. He is only interested in demarcating his own, new discursive practice, philosophy, against the claims and incursions ofpoetry, an intention which he would later guarantee by banning poets and rhapsodes from his perfect state. Only his students, from Aristotle to the Alexandrian philologists, would elaborate Plato's theoretical positions on the rational explication of poetry into a discipline of its own. Heinz Schlaffer explains that the perspective this new scientific discipline would have to take towards poetry is implied by the extemal parameters goveming the conversation between the philosopher and the rhapsode. 9 Had Socrates actually seen Ion's performance of the Homeric songs at Epidauros, he, too, would have been fascinated. Now, however, they are in Athens, in the middle of prosaic and quotidian events, and speak in prose about poetry whose magic is ineffective. In this location epic narration does not possess and control the imagination, but the thoughts are allowed to roam freely and can be used for the exchange and examination of arguments: reflection about poetry demands a geographic and temporary distance from it. If one wanted to extrapolate, one could say that this scene 'Cited from the 'Appendix' to Plata on Poetry, p. 235. 9 Poesie und Wissen, pp. 14-15.

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already implies the ideal situation of the scientific treatment of poetry, as it was to become reality later in Alexandria; poetry then would no longer be performed by rhapsodes, in the theatre, as a processional song, or during a feast, but now existed in reified form, as a book, open to the distanced (and thus rational) view of the researcher. Poetry would become literature, to be encountered in, for example, the great library of Alexandria, a building which still retained the metaphoric memory to poetic enthusiasm as its name, Museion, but which provided an institutional setting where disinterested, historical, philological, and thus unenthusiastic study of literature took place. In the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, when philology in the Classical and Modem languages and literatures became institutionalized at the German universities, scholars would take this metaphoric distance one step further when they published their critical editions and interpretive essays in joumals called Deutsches Museum für Geschichte, Literatur, Kunst und Alterthumsforschung, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, or Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen 10 und Literaturen. And like the imposing nineteenth-century museums of natural history and science, these philological museums and archives were expressions of national and imperial progress and power. 11 Plato's confrontation of Greek philosophy and poetry foreshadows the controversy between poetry and scientistic approaches in later centuries and these centuries' specific cultural conditions. In a modified form a quite similar discussion would happen at the transition from the Middle Ages to Barly Modemity, even if the critique then was not directed against the

10

An almost tautological-sounding example from Britain is the Philological Museum (1832-1833). The Zentrale Zeitschriftenbank, the central database for ail scholarly joumals in Germany's research libraries, lists dozens of titles beginning with or containing Museum or Archiv in the Humanities, the Social and the Natural Sciences. It is illustrative to keep in mind Michel Foucault's thoughts about the function(s) of the 'archive' which, working alongside the 'episteme', he describes as a set of discursive mechanisms which limit what may be researched and expressed, and in what form the texts may be known and remembered. See Foucault's The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1978), vol. I, pp. 14ff., and especially his L'Ordre du Discours: Leçon Inaugurale au College de France Prononcée le 2 decembre 1970 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971 ). 11 See John V. Pickstone, Ways of Knowing. A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 73-74.

Philology vs. Enthusiasm

7

claims of poetry, but the poetic carelessness of scholasticism which venerated religious, poetic, and scientific texts as authorities of equal 12 import. In the second half of the nineteenth century, German philologists negotiated similar issues in their attempts to distinguish their own work as professional scholars from that of private colleagues in other countries. Plato's Ion does not answer the anthropological question about the cultural functions of poetic discourse, because such an answer would challenge his own contemporaries' prevalent religious convictions. Nevertheless, by intimately linking poetry to an enthusiasm which is divinely inspired, but nevertheless incapable of producing truth, Plato has opened a Pandora's box. Implicitly, the Ion contains exactly the questions the answers to which would bring about poetics and philology as disciplines of their own. More importantly, Plato's problematizations would only be answered when a knowledge of fictions had evolved, so that a third element between truth and lie could be acknowledged and the licence for aesthetic experience would be given. That poetry is fictitious becomes obvious only because there is a definition of truth different from that which the poets pass off as true. In this respect, Plato's philosophy is a precondition for rendering conscious the relation between poetry and truth. Poetic enthusiasm was required to undergo philosophical critique so that its god-given irrationality could be revealed as the substance of aesthetic mimesis; of course with the consequence that the divine part of this enthusiasm was de-emphasized into a mere metaphor. Only in this humanized form could poetry become the subject of secular knowledge. 13 The distinction between philosophical truth and poetic 'truth' is also the logical version of a historical difference. Socrates, the philosopher, represents the most recent form of knowledge; Ion, the rhapsode, the oldest. Their dialogue is also to be understood as an altercation of the contemporary consciousness with its own cultural past. Because Homer' s 12

When Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae teaches that horses shed tears at the occasion of their owner' s death, he dis guises as zoological fact what he must have read in book XI of the Aeneid. 'When auctores corne into play, Isidore makes no kind of differentiation between them. The Bible, Cicero, Horace, Martial, Pliny, Juvenal, and Lucan (the latter chiefly on snakes), ail have for him exactly the same sort of authority. Yet his credulity has limits. He denies that weasels conceive by the mouth and bear by the ear [ ... ], and rejects the many-headed hydra as fabulosus'. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image. An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 149. 13 On this process, sec Schlaffer, Poesie und Wissen, pp. 45-75.

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epics originated hundreds of years ago, their meaning has become strange, so that the mere repetition of the words they contain (epe) no longer suffices, but the interpretation of the meaning (dianoia) has to intervene and assist (530b5-c6). Ion wants to be both singer and interpreter and does not notice that both capacities originate from different situations and demand different intellectual skills. As soon as the unreflected tradition of poetry becomes problematic and the historical distance between the origins and the later representation of poetry has become a conscious one, the productive poet and the reproductive singer will need, as a third specialist, the critically authenticating and interpreting philologist. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Classical philology had more than fulfilled Plato's initial desire for the establishment of a rational discipline of textual study and thought. Especially at the German universities of this period, it had evolved, along with the various fields in the natural sciences, into a lead discipline which not only shaped the paradigmatic character of language and literature study at these universities for a considerable period of time, but would also transform that study on the international level. By the late nineteenth century, as the Nietzsche-Wilamowitz controversy illustrates, philology was under attack for having taken the separation between poetic enthusiasm and scholarly study too far. Toward 1900, after a centuries-long series of transformational hausses and baisses, philological practices had finally reached a critical point, when they managed to situate and define themselves as a unified academic discipline distinct from the kinds of antiquarian approaches to Greek culture championed by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Following the procedures and terminologies designed by Friedrich August Wolf in his seminal study, Prolegomena ad Homerum (1775), and further systematized by August Boeckh's famous series of lectures, 'Encyclopaedia and methodology of all the philological 14 disciplines' (1809-1865), Classical philology eagerly embraced the status of an objective science, an Altertumswissenschaft which would abandon the traditional investigation of Classical literature based on subjective aesthetic 14 Boeckh's lectures were edited and published by Ernst Bratuschek (Enzyklopiidie und Methodologie der gesamten philologischen Wissenschaften (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1877)). The most comprehensive discussion ofthese early concepts of academic philology is Axel Horstmann's Antike Theoria und Moderne Wissenschaft. August Boeckhs Konzeption der Philologie (Frankfort a.M.: Peter Lang, 1992).

Philology vs. Enthusiasm

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experience or speculative metaphysics, in favour of one based on scientific method. August Boeckh's comprehensive and influential definition of 'philology' as 'Die Erkenntnis des Erkannten', that is, the study of the history and knowledge of all human thought and activity, and the widespread conviction that generous infusions of Latin and Greek at the secondary school level were the necessary prerequisite for a truly humanistic education, made philology the central academic discipline, first at Wilhelm von Humboldt's radically reformed Prussian University of Berlin (1810) and later - with Berlin as the model - at all other German (and Austrian) institutions of higher leaming. 15 However, this academizing of Classical philology at the universities also led to a synchronous narrowing of its practices. Increasing academic professionalization brought about increased specialization, and Classical philologists zealously implemented this specialization in order to be more successful in their defence of a terrain soon also claimed by scholars in the 'New' philologies and to keep up with the threat of the natural sciences which could boast ever new and exciting results in their fields. Not surprisingly, then, the specialization in Classical studies favoured mostly paradigms which lent themselves to formalized, positivistic, and scientistic approaches such as linguistics, prosody, lexicography, etymology, textual/manuscript study, and literary history, and the field closed its discursive realm to hermeneutical, aesthetic, or political and sociological methods of reading. In the existing academic climate, it was this very narrowing of scope and method which expanded the fame and importance of Classical philology. 16 In 1871, when Nietzsche's attempt at the re-broadening of philological endeavours in Die Geburt der Tragüdie was answered by Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, most elements of enthusiasm had been banned from the academic study of Classical texts. 17 Thus, while 15

See Robert Leventhal's thorough discussion, 'The Emergence of Philological Discourse in the German States 1770-1810' , ISIS 77, no. 287 (1986), 243-60. 16 This observation was made as early as 1854 by Karl Müllenhoff, 'Die deutsche Philologie, die Schule und die klassische Philologie', cited in Eine Wissenschaft etabliert sich, 1810-1870, ed. Johannes Janota (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980), pp. 277-303 (p. 292). 11 Interestingly, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's idea of work in Classical philology would become astonishingly broad soon after the altercation with Nietzsche. See Albert Henrichs's 'Nachwort' in the most recent reprint of WilamowitzMoellendor ff's 1921 Geschichte der Philologie, 3rd edn (Stuttgart and Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1998), pp. 81-93 (pp. 82-83).

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modem philologists acknowledged that the non-rational tmths of historical poetic texts had a legitimate claim to being preserved even if they contradicted modem science, they now strove to be in complete control of that process of preservation. Going beyond the role of simply saving the cultural records of times gone by for the present as well as for future generations, they developed strict mles about securing the authenticity of these texts. Ever suspicious of the umeliable process of textual transmission, they applied a host of critical, analytical, and classificatory methods (for example, recensio, examinatio, emendatio, glosscs, commentary, annotations) without which, they claimed, the meanings of historical texts could not be correctly understood. Based on the exciting and revealing forays into the relationships of languages established by an intensely comparative philology, the successors of Friedrich Schlegel, Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp, and Jacob Grimm had systematized their discoveries into laws (Grimm's, Vemer's, Kuhn's, Thomsen's, etc.), obviously in an attempt to attain the same validity for their results as claimed by the laws developed in the natural sciences. Tom Shippey, who has written the most succinct, convincing, and lively description of the ri se and fall of philological studies, sees the causes for the demise of the early, more broadly defined comparative philology - at least in Britain - in the philologists' scientistic impulses: Probably the short answer is that the essence of comparative philology was slog. There is something wistful in Tolkien's astonished praise of the 'dull stodges' of Leeds University [ ... ], in his insistence that at Leeds anyway 'Philology is making headway ... and there is no trace of the press-gang!' [ ... ]. For matters were different elsewhere. No science, Jacob Grimm had said of philology, was 'prouder, nobler, more disputatious, or less merciful to error' (my italics). Ali its practitioners accepted, to a degree now incredible, a philosophy of rigid accuracy, total coverage, utter right and utter wrong: in 1919 the old and massively distinguished Eduard Sievers happily put his reputation on the line when he offered to dissect a text provided unseen by Hans Lietzmann, and to show from linguistic evidence how many authors had composed it (he had already done the same thing to the Epistles of Paul). He got Lietzmann's specimen totally wrong. But no one said the idea of the 18 test was unfair.

18

The Road to Middle Earth (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), p. 9. Shippey's account of philology is contained in his first chapter, entitled 'Lit. and

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11

While the comparative, scientistic 'slog' Shippey diagnoses still shared its results as something relevant to extra-academic circles (as in the 'enthused' Max Müller, whose philological lectures 'bowled over not only (or not even) the leamed world in the 1860s and after, but also London's high society'), the discoveries of comparative philologists were soon communicated to members of the academy only and 'as facts, systems of facts, systems divorced from the texts they had been found in' (p. 9). Richard Wagner, who of course took Nietzsche's side in the 1871 controversy with Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, spoke out in a major German newspaper against the increasing discursive isolation of philologists and their excessive disciplinary hubris, both of which he interprets as forms of 19 social parasitism. Attacking specifically the idea of 'purposeless' scholarship, he explains that while a college of theology created priests, a college of law judges and lawyers, and a college of medicine medical doctors, that is, 'all practically useful citizens', 'philology always only produces more philologists who will only be of use to themselves' (p. 60). Thus, any philologist who dared, like Nietzsche, to use the sceptre of his institutional authority to venture outside the boundaries of acceptable philological discourse, would necessarily encounter disputatious reactions like that of Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Wagner praises Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy for breaking the rules of academic discourse: Right away we saw here that we were dealing with a philologist who speaks to us and not exclusively to philologists; this is the reason why our hearts opened and we gathered courage, which we had completely lost through the reading of the usual, citation-laden and deadly meaningless treatises [... ]. This time we got text and no annotations; we looked down from the heights of mountains into the wide plains, without being disturbed by the brawls of boors in the tavern below us. As it appears with hindsight, nothing will be conceded to us easily: philology retains its claim that you [Nietzsche] are on their turf, that you are not emancipated, but only an apostate, and that neither you nor we can be spared a thrashing as a pupil would get for bad grades. And indeed a veritable hail has corne upon us: a Dr. phil. has grabbcd the appropriate philological thunderbolt. (pp. 60-61) Lang.', pp. 1-21. 19 Richard Wagner, 'An Friedrich Nietzsche', Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 June 1872, pp. 296-302; the letter is cited here according to Der Streit um Nietzsches Geburt der Tradodie, ed. Karlfried Gründer (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969), pp. 58-64.

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Wagner, a major spokesperson for late romantic and nationalist enthusiasm in Germany, accused philologists of forming circles of specialists hermetically sealed off from society by forbidding terminologies and distanced, rigidly rational principles. He yeamed for the days when a quite double-edged enthusiasm had experienced a temporary comeback through the emergence of a nationalistic Germanistik as an independent academic discipline. In 1810, the first professorship in German language and literature at the newly founded University of Berlin had been given to an 'enthusiastic patriot', Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, despite a relatively sparse scholarly record; 20 already in 1811 he was sent on to a chair at the University of Breslau, an institution established expressly to strengthen the political ties between Prussia and Silesia; and in 1824 he was recalled to Berlin and given preference over the hard-core philologist Karl Lachmann who received his own position - at a lower rank - three years after von der Hagen. Jacob Grimm, the leading German language and literature scholar in the first half of the nineteenth century, represented something like a temporary compromise between national enthusiasm and a more narrowly-conceived philology. While Jacob and his brother looked down on von der Hagen's work on the Nibelungenlied as that of a dilettante, Jacob criticized Lachmann 's formalist practice of Textkritik as deterministic and 'always robbing and deleting'. 21 Many scholars' disappointrnent about the unsuccessful German attempt at unification in 1848 and the various post-1848 reactionary political pressures curbed their bourgeois national-liberal enthusiasm and played into the hands of their already more narrowly philological, Classical colleagues. Karl Lachmann, whose Berlin appointment was - tellingly in both German and Classical philology, and his numerous students demonstrate the methodological influence of Classical on German philology. To justify its existence as a Wissenschaft, post-1848 Germanists 20

Janota, 'Einleitung', Eine Wissenschaft etabliert sich, pp. 1-60 (p. 17). See Wilhelm Grimm's negative review of von der Hagen's work on the Nibelungenlied (originally published in 1809 in the Heidelberger Jahrbücher, reprinted in the volume I of Wilhelm Grimm's Kleinere Schriften, ed. by Gustav Hinrichs (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1881 ), pp. 61-91; Jacob Grimm expressed his critique ofLachmann's practice in a speech, 'Rede aufLachmann', on the occasion ofhis colleague's death (1851), cited here from the first volume of Jacob Grimm's Kleinere Schriften, entitled Reden und Abhandlungen (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1864), pp. 145-62 (pp. 156-57). 21

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13

concentrated on the more 'difficult', pre-modem periods and simply (and often simplistically) transferred the lead philology's instrumentarium and terminology for the study of historical texts to their own work in textual criticism, linguistic analyses, and literary history. By the time the Nietzsche-Wilamowitz controversy hit the headlines of German newspapers, Germanists were beginning to open their curricula to early modem and contemporary texts. However, their scholarly practices were still overwhelmingly positivistic and scientistic. German English studies, after going through a period of quite broadly and comparatively conceived interest by private scholars and school teachers (ca. 1780-1848) and a period of gradual philologization (ca. 1848-1871 ), was full y institutionalised only one year after the outbreak of hostilities between Nietzsche and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, whcn the Chaucerian Bernhard ten Brink was appointed Chair of English philology at the University of Stra13burg. As a latecomer and the least prestigious among the 'New' philologies, English philology wasted no time on elaborate theoretical discussions of its own social, political, or even institutional relevance. Instead, its representatives skilfully emulated those discursive moves which had already successfully implemented its sister disciplines. They quickly founded academic joumals, reviewed and catalogued their growing scholarly production in review publications and bibliographies, secured international connections, and concentrated on the specialties which characterized philological scholarship at this particular historie moment: As the too simplified (that is, de-synthesized) contemporary English laniiage was considered too easy for serious academic study, philologists gave preference to investigating Old, Middle, and Early Modem English texts; manuscript study; the linguistic and prosodie aspects of texts; and literary history. The overt national enthusiasms still so important to their predecessors in the first three fourths of the nineteenth century were slowly sublimated into the conviction that 1) philological discourse was a home-grown German product superior to any methodologies in other countries and 2) that by practising and exporting this kind of superior methodology they were contributing, in the academic arena, to Germany's rise to importance as a powerful modem nation state. After a period of about twenty-five to thirty years, during which impressive results were achieved in editing, chronologizing, cataloguing, and describing historical English texts and their language, the limitations of philological paradigms became more and more apparent. Extra-academic

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demands for a more practice-oriented teaching of the contemporary English language and culture (Reformbewegung), the growth of English studies into a Massenfach (subject with high enrolment) after 1900, and the retum of aesthetic, political, and sociological considerations for the study of literary texts brought about a gradual transformation of the limiting disciplinary boundaries. W orld W ar 1, which isolated German Anglicists from their Anglophone contacts and sources and made everything 'German', including philology, suspicious and soon unacceptable to Anglophone and other international scholars, greatly added to the transformative energy of this period. During the Third Reich, non-political philological practices served as a safe haven for those scholars unwilling to adapt their scholarship to an increasingly chauvinistic and racist general political climate. Consequently, it emerged after the war as one of those German traditions allegedly unblemished by the country's recent history. As such, the term and many of the practices of nineteenth-century philology, survived at the German universities and managed to prevent the growth of other promising approaches for a considerable period of time. Tom Shippey has demonstrated that existing dictionary definitions of philology are, 'symptomatically, unhelpful': The OED, though conceived and created by philologists and borne along by the subject's nineteenth-century prestige, has almost nothing useful to offer. 'Philology', it suggests, is: '1. Love of leaming and literature; the study of literature in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation . . . polite leaming. Now rare in general sense.' Under 2 it offers 'love of talk, speech, or argument' (this is an offensive sense in which philology is mere logic-chopping, the opposite of true philosophy); while 3 recovers any ground abandoned in 1 by saying it is 'the study of the structure and development of language; the science of language; linguistics. (Really one branch of sense 1)'. [ ... ] The Deutsches Worterbuch set in motion by Jacob Grimm (himself perhaps the greatest of ail philologists and responsible in true philological style for both 'Grimm's Law of Consonants' and Grimms' Fairy Tales) could do little better, defining philologie with similar inclusiveness as 'the leamed study of the (especially Classical) languages and literatures'. The illustrative quotation from Grimm's own work is more interesting in its declaration that 'none among ail the sciences is prouder, nobler, more disputatious than philology, or less merciful to error'; this at least indicates the expectations the study had aroused. Still, ifyou didn't know what 'philology' was already,

Philology vs. Enthusiasm the Grimm definition would not enlighten you.

15 22

More recent attempts at defining the nature of philology, such as the interdisciplinary contributions to Jan Ziolkowski's 1990 volume, On Philology, provide a picture at least as elusive or diverse as the one 23 presented in dictionaries. The reason for the difficulty in defining philology from any one standpoint is that, as a fluctuating set of practices, always defined and redefined in its relationship of and complicity or contestation with other, more enthusiastic discourses (aesthetics, journalism, politics, etc.), it changed (and still continues to change) when other discourses in society emerged or subsided. James Paul Gee has compared a discourse to a 'dance' that 'exists in the abstract as a coordinated pattern ofwords, deeds, values, beliefs, symbols, tools, objects, times, and places and in the here and now as a performance that is recognizable as just such a coordination'. Just like a dance, 'the performance here and now is never exactly the same. It all cornes down to what the "masters of the dance" will allow to be recognized as a possible 24 instantiation of the dance'. Instead of attempting a necessarily incomplete and overly abstract definition of philology, this study will investigate the various and changing instantiations during the rise and fall of the 'dance' in 25 one specific area, the field of German-speaking Chaucer studies. lt will 22

Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth, p. 6. On Philology, ed. by Jan Ziolkowski (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990). 24 An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. Theory and Method (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 19. 25 In order to avoid the awkward repetition of 'German-speaking', the study will employ the adjective 'German' to describe both Chaucer publications and Chaucerians from Austria, the thirty-nine pre-1871 German states, and the various political and geographical Germanies from 1871 through 1948. The problematic nature of including German-speaking Chaucerians from multi-lingual regions (for example, Kônigsberg, Breslau, Prague) or more clearly foreign-bom Chaucerians will become obvious in the narrative and the attempts by German Chaucerians to claim these scholars for Germany. In general, however, both Austrian and German Chaucerians themselves stress their common goals and scholarly practices so that reference to them as 'German' has its justification in their own national discursive preference. Swiss English studies, on the other hand, has a history distinctly different from the German-Austrian tradition. There, the increasing orientation toward scientistic and philological studies never superseded the pedagogy- and aesthetics-oriented study of English (see Gunta Haenicke, Zur Geschichte der Anglistik an deutschsprachigen Universitiiten 1850-1925 (Augsburg: University of 23

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follow those German and Austrian publications, actions, and especially the people who collaborated in disseminating, translating, editing, and interpreting Chaucerian texts in ever more narrowly philological ways. Every now and then cautiously gleaning from the heavily disputed ground of late twentieth-century discourse criticism, this investigation intends to describe and discuss - for the field of Chaucerphilologie between the l 790s to the l 940s - 'the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements, the way in which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures which are valorised for obtaining truth: the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true' .26 Thus, the emphasis of this study's narrative sections is less on a complete, linear reception history of Chaucer in the German-speaking world, a task at least to some degree realized by the accompanying annotated bibliography, but rather on how German Chaucerians built a particular discourse through language used in tandem with actions, interactions, non-linguistic symbol systems, objects, skills, tools, technologies, and distinctive ways of thinking, valuing, feeling, and believing. In addition to retracing the meandering path of German Chaucerphilologie through its various transformative phases, this investigation also has the following additional objectives: (1) By researching not a major national area of study, but a belatedly institutionalized and min or 'New' philology, that is, English studies in Germany and Austria, this investigation is meant to present a counterbalance against the contemporary tendency to examine mainly fields from which a naturally rich and unadulterated harvest of cultural nationalism can be expected. While recent studies in the archaeology of academic medievalism have centred on the pro-domo mentalities of French scholars of Romance philology or the pro-domo mythographies of German Germanists, the relationship between German Anglicists and their Anglophone subjects of scholarship is a more complicated one. For example, the German medievalists' need for access to English source materials as well as the desire among some English scholars to profit from the professional expertise of German philologists in the area of textual criticism created a relationship in constant need of considerate negotiation. Augsburg, 1979), pp. 198-210). 26 Michel Foucault, 'Truth and Power: An Interview with Alessandro Fontano and Pasquale Pasquino', Michel Foucault: Power/Truth/Strategy, ed. by Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (Sydney: Ferai Publications, 1979), pp. 29-48 (p. 46).

Philology vs. Enthusiasm

17

Moreover, the German propensity toward the hegemonization of early English studies had to be continually measured against the many personal friendships between German and English scholars and against strong general Anglophilie attitudes which in some cases survived even the strains of World War 1. (2) Since the late 1960s, philology - or rather one conveniently narrowly defined variant of it - has been used as a scapegoat in (Oedipal) contrast to which new movements in literary and language studies have defined their own sets of critical practices. Philology has been accused of promoting nation(al)ism, sexism, imperialism, racism, and being the etemal 'other' of critical theory, but such accusations are almost always presented as sound bites. Quite often, they can be recognized as political and opportunistic ploys for winning the upper hand in specific institutional and cultural power struggles which eerily resemble nineteenth-century philologists' own epic battles for gaining and maintaining symbolic and 27 material academic dominance. Although this book is not directed against the manifold critical views about certain aspects of philology, its case study character aims at offering a historicized and more detailed view of certain philological as well as enthusiastic practices. While this historicization may confirm a good number of the commonly held negative notions about philological work, it hopes to do justice to the multifaceted and historically, culturally, and individually specific conditions of such work. In the end, it wants to follow Paul Oskar Kristeller's recommendation that 'the historian of science will do well to recognize that the positive scientific discoveries of the past were never unrelated to the theoretical and philosophical assumptions of the investigating scientist, whether they were true or false from our point of view, whether consciously expressed or tacitly accepted 28 by him'. (3) On the other side of this disputed issue there is the conviction, still repeated by hard-core philologists, that philological practices are absolutely foundational for any literature and language study, and that subjectivist approaches to historical texts such as feminist or psychoanalytic readings 27

See, for example, Jonathan Culler's 'Anti-Foundational Philology', On Philology, pp. 49-52, where he claims that what is at stake in discussions about

philology is 'the empire of the P's', by which he refers to the language and literature call numbers in the Library of Congress cataloguing system. 28 Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), p. 67.

18

CHAPTERÜNE

not based on philological observations, at least in their early stages, are somehow inherently unscholarly, because the voices of their investigating subjects are too inextricably woven into the subjects of their investigations. Although these views no longer dominate the academy intemationally, even if only because philologists have lately been the 'victims, not the perpetrators, of exclusion' ,29 there can be no doubt that their unrelenting, categorical opposition to all so-called 'contemporary theories' perpetuates the composite image of the humourless, bespectacled, unenthusiastic 'dinosaur' or 'Mr. Procrustes', whose work bears no general social and political relevance whatsoever, who hides his 'wounded narcissism' behind 'the veil of philological expertise', and who happily indulges in the 'marginality of medieval studies' while sitting out revolutions, wars, and pogroms on his proverbial Sitzfleisch. 30 Here, too, this investigation may help to historicize both extreme imaginations of the respective scholarly other, as the motivations and actions of German Chaucerians are often much less easy to categorize than contemporary discussions on philology would suggest. (4) A further objective of this study is the demystification of a number of nationalist disciplinary mythographies about the British, the American, and the German roles in the history of Chaucer studies. A look at J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson's biography of the nineteenth-century German mathematician Theodor Franz Eduard Kaluza, recently published on the University of St Andrews's History of Mathematics Archive pages, may serve to explain the point. The entry mentions Theodor Kaluza's father, a well-published German Anglicist and Chaucerian: Theodor Kaluza's father was Max Kaluza. He belonged to a family 29

Jan Ziolkowski, '"What is Philology?" Introduction', On Philology, pp. 1-12 (p. 10). 0 ' The terms 'dinosaur' and 'Mr. Procrustes' are used in chapter headings by Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, trans. by Betsy Wing (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). The other citations are from R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols's 'Introduction' to Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. by R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichais (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 3. For a 'philological' critique of such notions, see, Peter F. Dembowski, 'Is there a New Textual Philology in Old French? Perennial Problems, Provisional Solutions', The Future of the Middle Ages. Medieval Literature in the 1990s, ed. by William D. Paden (Gainesville, FL: University Press ofFlorida, 1994), pp. 87-112.

Philology vs. Enthusiasm

19

which had lived in Ratibor for around 300 years. Max Kaluza was a fine scholar and, although German, he was a leading expert on English language and literature, with his special field being the 31 study ofChaucer.

The revealing insertion, 'although German', indicates the wide-spread nationalist conviction that 'a leading expert' on any given national literature and language would somehow naturally have to corne from among that nation's natives. In a related, Anglocentric move, Albert C. Baugh once claimed that 'Chaucer studies never really flourished in 32 Germany'. A detailed and nuanced examination of the actual production of Chaucer scholarship in Germany between 1793 and 1948 and its complex interrelations with the work oftheir Anglo-American colleagues at essential junctures will serve to contextualize the genesis of Baugh' s conscious attempt at obliterating and O'Connor and Robertson's unconscious marginalizing of the role of German Chaucerians. On the other hand, the longue durée of German Anglicists' own overestimation of their importance for the development of early English studies will also be 33 exposed as a deliberately created, painstakingly perfected fabrication. (5) A contributor to the 1999 edition of the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature recently voiced his astonishment that the possibility (and consequences) of interlanguages in early Middle English, a topic whose 'potential implications for literary and historical understanding are startling, has been taken up almost exclusively by non-English-speaking 34 linguistic specialists in inaccessible publications'. The reason is, of course, that most of the leading Anglo-American joumals and publishers, with their prevalent anti-philological emphases, arc simply not interested in the kind of work these non-Anglophone specialists are doing. If one adds into the equation the steadily decreasing number of Anglophone 31

Http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Kaluza.

html. 32 A. C. Baugh, 'Fifty Years of Chaucer Scholarship', Speculum, 26 (1951), 65972 (659). 33 Haenicke, Zur Geschichte der Anglistik, p. 371, indicates (although without documentation of his sources) that, even after World W ar II, there remained claims that German Anglicists had been responsible for more than half of ail pre-war EETS editions. The truth is that they edited not even one third ofthem. 34 Thomas Hahn, 'Early Middle English', The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 61-91 (p. 64, fn. 7).

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CHAPTERÜN E

medievalists who read and discuss scholarship written in languages other than their own, the general reception of non-English criticism (or their extradiscursive methodologies) in English-speaking countries is at an alltime low. And while no one yeams for the days when Chinese exchange students at Harvard's English Department were forced to leam their Old English from textbooks and grammars written in German and published in Leipzig or Tübingen, today's legitimate demands for diversity in medieval studies should perhaps not be limited altogether to questions of psychoanalysis, gender, and race discussed solely within the limiting boundaries of an Anglophone monoculture. Between 1870 and 1925, one third to one half of all academic publications on Chaucer were produced, albeit as part of a problematic political agenda, in German and informed by philological paradigms. This fact alone should make it greatly attractive to aspiring Chaucerians to acquire - in addition to basic proficiency in medieval Latin and Old French - at least a reading knowledge of scholarly German, as well as to get some exposure to philological expertise during their own formative years in higher education. This study, which presents substantial sections of Chaucerphilologie in English translation for the first time, wants to spark renewed interest in a joyous linguistic and methodological pluralism for Chaucer criticism, in studies which would be conscious of enthusiasm and philology not as the monolithic blacks constructed by nincteenth-century nationalism or twentieth-century poststructuralism, but as complementary ways of reading and knowing, ever ready for new and exciting renegotiation by the transnational but multilingual community of Chaucerians.

___.., 4

c>t-

mùlti eum poetae sibi tanquam exempla1· ad imitandum sumerent. Haec tamert Cliauceri cum de lingua anglica tum de poesi in uuiversum merila non defuerunt qui acriter impugnarent atque hoc potissimum ei vitîo vertcrent, quod mulla verba gallica in linguam anglicam recepisset et versus non numerose sonantes composuisset; quos quidem crlticos haud sane difficile est ad demonstrandum 11011 solum omnium rerum statum qualis id temporis fuit, sed etiam linguae condicionem et indolem prorsus ignorare, Ab altero quidem crimine quod a neglecta arte metnca petitur poetam postea liberare studebimus, cum de e finali sermo erit. Ad prius autem quod attlnet crimen, scillcet multis additamentis galllcis conspicuam esse Chauceri Hnguam, satis dixisse mihî videor in eîs quae ante disputavi. Rudis enim et aspera qualis id aetatis fuit lingua anglica necesse erat compensaretur quasi et excoleretur exculta atque polita lingua gallica. Accedebat quod multae notlones et significationes per Normannos inductae erant quae lingua auglica prorsus non potuerunt exprimi. Quae cum ita essent tantum aberat ut ex propria Iingua verba ad notiones exprimendas quaererentur 1 ut multo commodîore via ex Iîngua gallica reciperentur, id. quod non solus fecît Chaucerus, quem quidem minus aegre ferimus fuisse linguao gallicae nimis studîosum, quippe qui ipse a N ormannis oriundus fuisset; 1) sed iam ante eum mu1ti alii eandem viam secuti sunt in qua ipse persistebat, 2) cum tali lingua usus esset qualis 1) Haec Chauceri origo iam ex nomine ipso lntélllgilur; nam' 'et vraenomen Jeffrey (Godofredus) est gallicum et Ol1aucier sive Chausier in ve,tere lingua gallica significat ,,calcearium." 2) E. Guestius in libro qui inscribitur ,,A Hlstory of englislt rhythms, London 1838.,.2 voll." Chaucerum primum fuisse dlcit qui nnglicam Ilnguam cum galllca coniunxisset. (Cf. vol, II p. 106';) ,,French dld not miro witl1 our language tilt the dayG of ChaucerJ' Sed prorsus alitèr rem ses~ habere facile intelligere

Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius' De Lingua Chauceri (Bonn, 1847), p. 4 - the first 'German' doctoral dissertation on Chaucer. This extract discusses one of the stock topics of Chaucerphilologie, the assimilation of English and French in the poet's texts.

Chapter 2

Literary Enthusiasm, 'Pre-March' Nationalism, and N ascent Scientism: 1793-1848 As we have seen, philology is a lore of the monuments of the human mind; it is the treasure house of the Atrides, in which all the jewels, which the human mind has produced at any time and in any country, are stored in most beautiful order. Carl Friedrich Elze, Über Philologie ais System (1845) Professionalization took curricular form first as philology, then as New Criticism, and later as 'theory'. The development of philology was driven by two different but related motives. One, under the influence of German linguistic scholarship, was the attempt to be more 'scientific' and 'Germanie' - and this was not without a whiff of Aryan racism. The other was the need to compete with classical studies and the sciences in terms of the mental rigor that such study was supposed to produce in its students. Robert Scholes, The Rise and Fall ofEnglish (1998)

T

his first period of modem Chaucer reception by German-speaking writers and critics is characterized by a growing curiosity about the medieval English poet and by the fact that, in the absence of an institutionalized subject of Anglistik at the universities, most texts on Chaucer from these fifty-odd years are written by school teachers and by what a more professionalized age would call 'dilettantes' and 'private scholars'. Johann Joachim von Eschcnburg, who writes the first substantial entry on the poet, was a professor at the Collegium Carolinum in Braunschweig and an excellent translator of Shakespeare and other authors, and had strongly comparative, interdisciplinary, and pedagogical 1 backgrounds. For him and the other early Chaucer enthusiasts, common 1

On Eschenburg's biography and his truly daunting production as a writer,

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CHAPTER Two

sources for information about the poet are the better known late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century English literary histories and essayistic studies and appreciations (for example, Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry 1774; Thomas Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, 1819); John Hippisley, The Mature Youth of Poetry, 1837), and William Thynne's 1775 edition of Chaucer. Similarly intluential is William Godwin's 1803 Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, which Carl Wilhelm Friedrich von Breyer makes available to German readers in considerab ly shortened and revised form as early as 1812. The news about Chaucer's achieveme nts as an essential medieval poet reaches even wider circles through Friedrich von Oertel's 1798 translation of Harriett Lee's modem adaptation of the Canterbury Tales, translations by Karl Ludwig Kannegiess er (1827), Eduard Fiedler (1844), and Fr. Jacob (1847), and a number of textbooks and school anthologies which include mostly short Chaucerian selections. 2 However, there is at least one early, strictly scholarly voice critical of any modemizat ion or translation of historical monuments . In 1841, an anonymous writer for the Bliitter far literarische Unterhaltung hopes that, provided that more Englishme n take up the scientific study of the history of their language, 'they will unleam to enjoy reading Chaucer in contempor ary English garb just as the translations of the Nibelungenlied and [ ... ] other Middle High German poetic texts are beginning to be of secondary importance compared with the study of the originals in our

translator, and critic, see Fritz Meyen, Johann Joachim Eschenburg 1743-1820 (Braunschweig: Waisenhaus-Buchdruckerei und Verlag, 1957). On his views on literary history, see Manfred Pirscher, Johann Joachim Eschenburg. Ein Beitrag zur Literatur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte des achtzenhnten Jahrhunderts (Doctoral Dissertation: University of Münster, 1960), pp. 103-48. 2 Other English-language sources repeatedly mentioned or cited by early German Chauceriana are: John Berkenhout, Biographia Litteraria (1777); Samuel Johnson, Lives of the most eminent English Poets (1687); Andrew Kippis and Joseph Towers, eds., Biographia Britannica (1747-60; a German edn, Sammlung von

merkwürdigen Lebensbeschreibungen groj3ten Theils aus der Britischen Biographie übersetzt, by Siegmund Baumgarten and Joh. Salomo Semler was published in 1754-70); Thomas Park and Acton Frederick Griffith, eds., Bibliotheca Anglopoetica (1815); William Winstanley, Lives of the most famous English Poets (1775), Edward Phillips, Theatrum poetarum Anglicanorum (1675). On most of

these English sources, cf. Derek Brewer's invaluable collection on Chaucer reception, the two-volume Chaucer. The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

Literary Enthusiasm, 'Pre-March 'Nationalism, & Nascent Scientism

25

3

country' . Beyond the general readerly curiosity about foreign and early literary texts, the writers' and translators' commentaries or introductions either see the complete alterity of Chaucer's writings or their promising modemity. Johann Gottfried Herder, for example, relegates Chaucer and Spenser to the tradition of the medieval 'minstrels' or 'troubadours' who do not yet know how to incorporate the author-subject within their 'amusing' fables and tales, while Johann Joachim Eschenburg's own enlightenment mentality reads the medieval poet as a harbinger of modem times, whose texts helped bring about 'the dawning of a day whose light would [ ... ] soon spread [ ... ] 4 everywhere'. While Herder is known for his propagation of the term Volksgeist, his more specific role for the rising reputation of Early English poetry in Gcrmany is less often acknowledged. Ilowever, his 1777 essay on the similarities between what he calls 'the English and German poetry of the middle period' is foundational for the understanding of the growing German interest in the literary production and heritage of England and the concomitant rejection of the still dominant French cultural models. 5 In his essay, Herder describes the Anglo-Saxons as a German(ic) people whose popular songs, fairy tales, and mythology can help supplement the partially still unearthed sources of the Germans' past. Unlike England, where Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare have made ample literary use of such popular traditions, Germany does not know a similarly strong, national literature. Therefore, Herder recommends that Germans follow the example of Bishop Percy and others, that is, that they collect the old German songs and ballads in order to strengthen and rebuild a cultural spirit which would be as unified as that of the English people, even if the current hegemony of (French) neo-classical tastes inhibits such work. Herder' s opposition to 3

'Chaucer in modemem Gewande', Blatter für literarische Unterhaltung, 97

(1841), 391-92 (392). 4

Johann Gottfried von Herder, Briefe zur Beforderung der Humanitat (1796), cited according to Herder's Samtliche Werke, ed. by Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1883, repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1883), XVIII, p. 100. Johann Joachim Eschenburg, 'Gottfried Chaucer', Charaktere der vornehmsten Dichter aller Nationen nebst kritischen und historischen Abhandlungen über Gegenstiind der schOnen Künste und Wissenschaften, ed. by J. G. Dyk and Georg Schaz (Leipzig: Dykische Buchhandlung, 1793), p. 113.

' 'Von der Âhnlichkeit der mittleren englischen und deutschen Dichtkunst', cited according to Herder's Samtliche Werke, ed. by Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1878, repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1994), IX, 522-57.

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CHAPTER Two

French cultural influences, his romantic yeaming for a national unity gained through an inalienable cultural (and racial) heritage, which would find its inspiration in a mythographic medieval period, and his repeated preference for the linguistically related sister-nation, England, begins one of the most productive and problematic lines of thinking within the history of German medieval studies and Chaucer reception. His call for the enthusiastic study of medieval texts could be applied equally well to the resistance against absolutism in the many German princedoms and states before and after 1848, to the Franco-German military and intellectual arms races between 1870 and 1918, and to the Nazi-inspired views of the function ofEnglish studies in Germany after 1933. 6 The Chauceriana produced within the fifteen years preceding the German 'March Revolution' of 1848 show more and more signs of a cultural nationalism which highlights the parallels between the victorious emergence of an English national language and Chaucer' s decisive role in that emergence with German intellectuals' own de sire for unifying the German nation beyond the already existing unity guaranteed by its common language. Disappointed by the restoration policies following the military victory over Napoleon's France in the decisions of the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the Carlsbad Decrees (1819), which reaffirmed the mostly absolutist rulers in thirty-nine German states and attempted to stifle political activities, the German bourgeoisie strove first for the limited goal of fully parliamentary constitutions for each individual state in order to gain - in the end - the greatly coveted political and economic unification of the whole of Germany. A large number of intellectuals sought to attain these goals through the promotion and study of (early) German literature and the establishment of Germanistik as an independent subject at the universities. This new, nationally-minded philology of the German language and literature allowed for a more enthusiastic, comparative, often 6

Theodor Spira, for example, in his lead essay, 'Beitrage zur Geschichte und Aufgabe der Englischen Studien in Deutschland' for the 1936 edition for Anglia (volume 60, pp. 1-18), uses Herder's essay in exactly this manner. See Eduard Fiedler's 'Einleitung zu Chaucers Leben und Werken', in Chaucers CanterburyErzahlungen (Dessau: Fritsche und Sohn, 1844), p. 27, where he praises Chaucer and the German poets, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Hartmann von Aue, for their free rendering ofvarious French literary models. Chaucer, Wolfram, and Hartmann become 'real' poets only by nationalizing (Englishing, Germanizing) these foreign texts.

Literary Enthusiasm, 'Pre-March 'Nationalism, & Nascent Scientism

27

politically and socially conscious work, of course generally within the accepted boundaries of bourgeois liberalism, and Jacob Grimm's 'wild' philological practice probably best represents some of the strengths and weaknesses of German studies during this period. 7 However, translations or short entries on a medieval English poet - much less subject to the strict censorship in most German states - could also be made to serve the bourgeois national cause, as when Chaucer' s alleged linguistic unification of England is celebrated, in an 1845 encyclopaedia for the 'educated classes', as the first hoisting of 'the pure banner of the people's language'. 8 And Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius, in the first doctoral dissertation on Chaucer by a German academic, De Lingua Chauceri (1847), may have underlined the poet's popular appeal and his merit for integrating the unbroken Anglo-Saxon with the more superficial Norman-French linguistic traditions into a common English language for similar political reasons. 9 Despite their often-invoked memorialization of the poet's importance for the English 'people' and the unification of the 'people' s' language, the German 'Pre-March' (Vormarz) Chaucerians are really only representative of the well-educated German middle classes, whose members' dreams were often decidedly unrevolutionary and more concemed with the substantial economic advantages of national unification than with any substantial democratization. Even one of the more outspoken voices among German Chaucerians, Eduard Fiedler, a collector of popular poetry and translator of a substantial portion of the Canterbury Tales, can serve as a good example of how the bourgeois agenda directly influenced his relatively conservative appreciation of Chaucer's biography and literature. As Renate Haas has demonstrated, Fiedler's entire introduction to his 1844 translation needs to be read against the background of this bourgeois cultural nationalism: [I]n various places, he accentuated the parallels to his own time so much that his criticism of fourteenth-century misuses indirectly criticized the same misuses of the present and that, on the other hand, he revealed some possibilities of remedying them. Thus, he 7

The term 'wild' philology has been used by Ulrich Wyss, Die wilde Philologie. Jacob Grimm und der Historismus (München: C. H. Beck, 1979), to describe Jacob's broadly conceived work. 8 See the entry on 'Gottfried Chaucer' in J. Meyer's Grosses ConversationsLexicon far die gebildeten Stande (Hildburghausen: Bibliographisches Institut, 1840), 47--49 (p. 49). 9 De Lingua Chauceri (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1847), pp. 3-5.

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CHAPTER Two

exposed the despotism and favomitism of some kings and the brutality of the fights for succession and detailed the trespasses which in nineteenth-century Germany were not acknowledged officially as trespasses yet: notably taxation and royal monopoly without consent of Parliament, infringements on jurisdiction, and imprisonment because of open speeches held in Parliament. At the same time, he showed that Parliament had continued to protest against such trespasses, heeded ail chances of regaining power and soon succeeded thanks to its vote on taxation. Beside the role of Parliament and of the middle classes in it, Fiedler specifically stressed the important contribution made by writers and scholars towards emancipation. Their principal merit consisted in his eyes in 'undermining the respect' for the pope and the depraved clergy (pp. 3--4). This thrust was again typical of the Vormarz, as the churches felt greatly threatened by the liberalization and as therefore political and religious reactionism often went together. No wonder, that Fiedler saw Chaucer as a follower of Wyclif and that he mentioned the possibility of the Parson being a portrait of the reformer (p. 26). Like other Vormiirz Germans, Fiedler was interested in the details, derived from The Testament of Love, about Chaucer's participation in conjurations and matters that (as he simply had to quote) 'seemed then noble and glorious to ail the people'. On the other hand, he tried to minimize or explain away Chaucer's putative betrayal of the other plotters (pp. 12-14). That Fiedler's aim did not go beyond a constitutional monarchy becomes repeatedly evident and most clearly so in his evaluation of the Peasants' Revoit whose connection with Wyclif he was at pains to deny (pp. 4-5). 10

Fiedler's national-liberal leanings are typical of 'Pre-March' literary historians who hold - like the poet and scholar Ludwig Uhland - that any 'objective truth' always has to have a 'subjective' relevance, that any

0

'From the Vormiirz to the Empire: The Golden Age of German Chaucer Scholarship', Poetica 29130 (1989), 102-114 (105-106); the page nmnbers in Haas's citation refer to Fiedler's introduction). Nolte and Ideler, Handbuch der englischen Sprache und Literatur (Berlin: C. G. Nauck, 1811) call the poet 'an enlightened man in religious matters' who followed 'Wyclif's more liberal religious maxims' (p. 5); and O. L. B. Wolf, The Poets of Great Britain from Chaucer to Bayly (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1846), p. 1, stresses Chaucer 'was inclined toward Wyclif' s followers'. Cf. further the Dutch scholar, S. Gronemann, Diatribe in Johannis Wicliffi Reformationis prodromi, Vitam, Ingenium (Trajecti ad Rhenmn: Rob. Nathan, 1837), who uses Chaucer and Langland to support the justification of Wyclifs biting criticism of the medieval church (pp. 76-77). '

Literary Enthusiasm, 'Pre-March 'Nationalism, & Nascent Scientism

29

work on the past should necessarily have 'meaning for the present'. 11 The most widely received example of such consciously anti-objectivist literary histories is Georg Gottfried Gervinus's five-volume Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen (1835-1842). Directly opposed to the increasingly isolationist and elitist specialists on German philology at the universities, Gervinus wants to reach all those academic and nonacademic readers whose central goal was the establishment of a German nation state. Consequently, he rejects the exclusive literature of the German medieval and Baroque courts, celebrates the beginnings of popular literature in the sixteenth century, and regards the synthesis of leamed and popular elements in the late eighteenth century (Deutsche Klassik) as the zenith of poetic art. His own present Gervinus reads as a time not for literary production, but for political and cultural activism. In his opinion, literature no longer has any essential function in the present or future, only in the past. Due to the political situation in Germany, history needed to be 12 made, not written. None of the few histories ofEnglish literature written between 1793 and 1848, and including sections on Chaucer, exhibits similarly radical views. Johann Georg Theodor GriiBe's Lehrbuch einer Literargeschichte (1842), for example, is little more than an encyclopaedic, only very moderately narrativized, catalogue of bio-bibliographic data with an emphasis on manuscripts, editions, source study, and histories of motifs. 13 By the 1840s, GraBe's genre of Literargeschichte, a considerably leamed, but completely forbidding read for any non-specialist because of its staccato style of acronyms, abbreviations, in-text annotations, and the almost complete absence of interpretation, is already in the process of being replaced by the still scholarly, but fully narrativized Literaturgeschichte, one of the foundational areas of institutionalized philological study. Two publications in this emerging genre deserve closer attention: Victor Aimee Huber's introduction, entitled 'Historische Entwickelung der englischen Poesie', to 11

Ludwig Uhland, Geschichte der deutschen Poesie im Mittelalter, ed. by Wilhelm Ludwig Bolland, and others (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1865), p. 17. 12 On Gervinus and his Geschichte, see Jost Hermand, Geschichte der Germanistik (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994), pp. 44-45. 13

Lehrbuch einer Literiirgeschichte der berühmtesten Volker des Mittelalters oder Geschichte der Literatur der Araber, Armenier, Perser, Türken [ . .] vom Untergange des westromischen Reiches bis zur Zerstorung des ostromischen Kaisertums (Dresden und Leipzig: Arnold, 1842), 1031-37.

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his Englisches Lesebuch (1833), and Siegmund Imanuel's essay, 'Geschichte der Englischen Litteratur' (1841 ). 14 Huber (1800-1869), whose family background includes famous names from the cultural and intellectual elite such as Christian Gottlob Heyne, one of the foundational figures of Classical studies (his grandfather), Therese Huber, a writer and joumalist (his mother), and Ferdinand Huber, a literary critic (his father), is of specific interest for the formative phase of German English studies. Under the depressing vision of post-Napoleonic European politics, he developed from a (late) romantic rebel into a ùecidedly antiliberal, even reactionary voice, who would actively oppose demands for England-like constitutional reform and join Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg's conservative 'militant religions restoration' movement (militante geistliche Restauration), which denounced the freedom of human thought and postulated that reason and research both had to be subordinate to faith, and that all grammar schools should be under strict ecclesiastic control. Huber received his 1843 call to the prestigious Chair of 'New Philology, Literature, and Literary History' at the University of Berlin through the patronage of the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and his camarilla. His main task as a widely travelled and multilingual specialist in the literatures and histories of the western world was to combat the authors of progressive ideas in Germany, 'because their representatives were in close contact with like-minded people abroad and imported central ideas and information from Britain and France, as both countries were economically, socially, and politically more advanced, while the USA played an increasing role in emigration' .15 14

V. A. Huber, Englisches Lesebuchfür hohere Schulclassen (Bremen: Wilhelm Kaiser, 1833), pp. 9-83; S. !manuel, Probe einer Geschichte der englischen National-Litteratur, Beilage zu dem Jahres-Berichte des Gymnasii zu Minden (Minden: Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Müller, 1841), pp. 5-25. Huber's and Imanuel's biographies and exemplary roles during the foundational phase of German Anglistik are the subject of Renate Haas's excellent monograph, V. A. Huber, S. ]manuel und die Formationsphase der deutschen Anglistik. Zur Philologisierung der Fremdsprache und der sozialen Demokratie (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1990). Haas has recently Englished the results of her work on Huber in her essay, '1848 and German English Studies / German Philology', European English Studies: Contributions towards the History of a Discipline, ed. by Balz Engler and Renate Haas ([Leicester]: Published for the European Society for the Study of English by The English Association, 2000), pp. 293-311. 1 ' Haas, '1848', p. 298.

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Huber's political views are already visible in the extensive introduction to his Englisches Lesebuch, published in the same year in which he accepted a call as Professor of 'New' (that is, Non-Classical) 'Literature and History' at the University of Rostock (1833). Not unlike Georg Gottfried Gervinus's literary history, Huber's 'Historische Entwickelung der englischen Poesie' reads the history ofliterature as a subtext to current political events and targets students in schools as an important audience for his ideas about the contemporary relevance of past texts and events. Eager to erase the potential model character of England's history for German readers, he abstains from the topos of deploring the weakening of German(ic) culture, values, and language through the Norman-French invasion. Huber makes mention of the 'satirical' Langland, perhaps because he feels akin to the medieval writer's religious convictions. Gower's importance he sees less in his literary work than 'in the way in which he represented the new English poetry in his position at the court of Richard II and the way in which he had a marked influence on the people 16 around him'. Because Huber names the Confessio Amantis as having merely literary significance, this somewhat nebulous statement might be a veiled reference to the Vox Clamantis, a more directly politically engaged text, which includes Gower's request to Richard II to re-establish virtue and order after the Peasants' Revolt. 17 For Huber, who would become the first German university professor to dedicate entire university lectures to the father of English poetry, Chaucer is the unrivalled paragon of fourteenth-century English literature. Unlike Theodor GraBe or Otto Wolf, who make clear distinctions between the poet's independent and original creations and his adaptations and imitations from French and ltalian poets, 18 Huber's interdisciplinary background helps him recognize the unity of European medieval literary production and Chaucer' s originality in his transformation of existing motifs and plots. 19 He also praises the medieval poet for including members of different estates in his Canterbury Tales, according to Renate Haas an indication of 16

Buber, Englisches Lesebuch, p. 15. Baas, V. A. Huber, S. !manuel und die Formationsphase, p. 27, fn. 5, also raises the possibility of Buber's hinting at Gower's depiction of the 1392 reconciliation between the king and the city of London. 18 GraBe, Lehrbuch der Literiirgeschichte, pp. 1033-35; Wolf, The Poets of Great Britain, pp. xi and 1. 19 Buber, Englisches Lesebuch, p. 16. 17

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how much his literary judgment was guided by his political goals and not by formal or aesthetic considerations. Chaucer's Middle Ages and Shakespeare's Early Modemity are for Huber especially attractive, as he perceives in them his own ideal of a social order based on clearly distinguishable but peacefully coexisting estates, held together by a universal Christian spirit of community and govemed by a noble and 20 gracious monarch. Huber's 'Historische Entwickelung' is the first comprehensive attempt - in German English studies - at replacing the unwieldy and unreadable genre of Literéirgeschichte with a logical, fully-sustained historical narrative. The discursive traits of the seventy-two-page text are those of the essay or the joumalistic opinion piece whose style, tone, and terminology can be understood by a general readership. The text is not interrupted by numbered section headings, there is no bibliography, and only very few footnotes have been included. Siegmund lmanuel's Probe einer Geschichte der englischen Nationalliteratur, published only eight years after Huber's text, presents a very different picture of the discourse of literary history. A greatly experienced practitioner in language teaching, !manuel indicates in his 'Preface' that the study of modem languages has to be 'thorough and scientific', that in addition to the unduly stressed practical value of language leaming, the 'true education' of the youth has to reach 'deeper and higher, formal and historical' levels. 21 Convinced that such a thoroughly historical and scientific approach has not yet been written for English studies, he has decided to make such an 'attempt' (hence the title 'Probe'). He lists the various lacunae in existing sources of information in English studies, singling out Huber's 'Historische Entwickelung' as a step in the right direction, 'intelligent' and 'well reflected', but 'too general' and without enough 'biographical' and 'specifically literary data', undoubtedly a good-humoured but serious critique ofhis predecessor's subordination of the literary and scientific to political purposes. !manuel also stresses the 'laborious' nature of collecting information and writing in a scholarly fashion and the lack of time due to other professional duties. Both these remarks and the virtues they celebrate (industriousness and dedication to serious scholarly goals) will become topoi of paratexts in the increasingly professionalizing study of historical English texts. 20 21

Haas, V. A. Huber, S. !manuel und die Formationsphase, pp. 28 and 37. 'Vorwort', unpaginated.

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Another major difference between the two critics' texts is that Imanuel's puts more emphasis on surveying the development of the English language. !manuel even detaches his section on language (pp. 5-8) from his longer discussion of literary history (pp. l 0-25) by inserting a substantial bibliography of 'sources and auxiliary texts'. The conspicuous placement of the bibliography precedes the actual text in many doctoral dissertations on Chaucer in the final third of the nineteenth century, when they serve as clear signposts of scientific discourse. The text of Imanuel's history of English 'national literature' itself, while supposedly intended for an audience of students at the secondary level, strives toward scholarliness. Each historical section (!manuel concentrates only on 'I. Die alte Zeit', subdivided into a) Celtic times through the Norman invasion and b) 1066 through the end of the fifteenth century, and intends to write on the later periods in the future) is clearly distinguished by numbers and horizontal bars. Furthermore, footnotes, which take up one tenth to one third of each page, exemplify the learned character of the essay. Unlike Huber, !manuel subscribes wholeheartedly to the desire for common origins of the Anglo-Saxons and Germans inhabiting both shores of the (English) channel. Following the dominant terminology and ideology among Germanists, he uses 'German' and 'Germanie' as completely synonymous and is happy to note that the Norman-French influence after 1066 never transformed the fundamentally German character of the English 22 nation (p. 7, fn. 1). However, he welcomes the positive influence of Latin 'inkhorn words' on the unsophisticated Anglo-Saxon language (p. 15). Moreover, as a trained Classical philologist with a doctoral degree from the University of Leipzig (1813), he shows considerable interest in more narrowly philological questions. Thus, the authenticity of Macpherson's Ossian is given as much space as the entire section on Old English texts; his discussion of Old English literature focuses on the questions of orality and literacy so dear to scholars of the Iliad and Odyssey; and his observations on the importance of translations from Latin sources for the development of Old English is an additional indication of his sympathies toward a learned, Classical and humanistic education (pp. 1-14). Within Imanuel's longer section on Middle English literature (pp. 1425), which he does not yet call 'Middle English' because he is not 22

Strangely enough, he begins his account of the 'national literature' of England after Anglo-Saxon times, that is, 'after the different elements of language and people had developed into a unified whole' (p. 11).

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cognizant of Jacob Grimm's linguistic periodization put forward in his Deutsche Grammatik (1819), 23 Chaucer takes centre stage as 'the first significant English poet', an artist who outshines all of his predecessors (p. 21). While it should be expected that Gower's texts might impress !manuel with their leamed allusion and Classical erudition, it is Chaucer who is praised for these qualities, and Gower's prose is characterized as 'stiff and cold' (p. 21). Proud ofhis own university education, !manuel gladly credits the poet with formal study at Oxford and Cambridge. He also underlines his ample international travel experience and connections with the great poets Petrarch and Boccaccio, but foregoes mention of any courtly influences as part of the basis for Chaucer's broad knowledge. !manuel also avoids Huber's false claim that the poet was bom into a noble family, thus revealing his middle-class distance to Huber's conservative and proaristocratic position. When !manuel attempts a list of Chaucer's writings, it becomes clear that his sedulous collecting of details and his well-intentioned annotations cannot replace direct reading and study of the texts or a more thorough and critical assessment of his sources and bibliographies. His catalogue of Chauceriana includes such texts as 'The Court of Love', 'The Crafty Lover', 'The Remedy of Love', and 'The Lamentation of Mary Magdalene, according to Origenes', but it banishes the authentic Parliament of Fowls and the Legend of Good Women into footnotes as works of 'minor value and importance' (p. 22, fn. 7). One can often recognize how certain contradictory aspects of this account of the poet have been taken from different English, German, and French sources, as where the topos of the first and greatest medieval English poet is suddenly slandered when !manuel denies him the status of a 'productive poet-genius' because he depends too much on foreign writers (p. 23). And after a paragraph of highest praise for the poet's normative influence on the development of the English language, poetry, and prosody, !manuel suddenly sides with those prevalent nationalist 'Pre-March' voices who would see Chaucer as 'not 23

On Jacob Grimm's introduction of 'Old', 'Middle', and 'Modem' as terms describing the morphological shifts intime of West Germanie languages, see David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. xxviii. Matthews (p. 131) also shows that English scholars in the 1830s and 1840s (for example, Frederic Madden) were not yet aware of Grimm's distinctions either. Grimm's periodization would not have conformed exactly with Imanuel's longue durée.

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national enough and burdened with too much foreign footing to have a lasting effect on the people and the foundation of a truly national poetic tradition' (p. 23). As Renate Haas states, Imanuel's attempt to imitate the Zeitgeist and write (English) literary history under 'national' auspices demonstrates some of the typical problems of scholarly work in English studies prior to the establishment of English as a university discipline. His autodidacticism and the researching and writing under the pressure of daily professional responsibilities result in misunderstandings, the falsification of information due to superficial secondary sources, self-contradictions, cliché-laden assessments, and a strong dependence on dated authorities. 24 Nevertheless, !manuel is one step ahead of other early literary historians who never consult more than one or two English sources from which to abstract their short appreciations of Chaucer and medieval English poetry. 25 The efforts at authentication in Imanuel's early endeavour and his conspicuous desire to apply at least the extemal features of early nineteenth-century scientistic discourses to the study of English literature are telling indications of the new direction the field would take. The same approval of Chaucer's leamedness and a special interest in his classical sources also characterize the first substantial scholarly essay on the poet in German, written by Eduard Fiedler and published in the second volume of Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, one of the first German joumals dedicated entirely to the 'New', that is 'Non26 Classical', languages and literatures. Fiedler reaches the objective of his essay, a 'judgment' or 'evaluation' ('Beurtheilung') of the medieval poet by cautiously emphasizing his 'not contemptible' knowledge of Latin and by demonstrating his dependence on Boethius, Statius, Juvenal, Livy, Macrobius, Maximianus, Seneca, Suetonius, Cicero and Valerius Maximus. 24

For an excellent, detailed discussion oflmanuel's Probe and a comparison with Huber's 'Historische Entwickelung', see Haas, V A. Huber, S. !manuel, und die Formationsphase, pp. 179-200. In addition to Haas's list of Imanuel's various misunderstandings and mistakes in his hastily written text, there are numerous glaring spelling errors and confusions about titles and authors' names in his bibliography and footnotes which support her assessment of the content. 25 See, for example, F. Michaelis's two-page survey of Chaucer's life and works in his 'AbriB der englischen Literaturgeschichte', Jahresbericht über die Lobnichtsche hOhere Stadtschule für das Jahr von Ostern 1845 bis Ostern 1846 (Kèinigsberg: Dalkowski, 1846), pp. 5-6, which derives most of its information from Percy's Reliques (1775). 2 " 'Zur Beurtheilung des Chaucer', Archiv, 2 (1847), 151-69 and 390--402.

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In an intellectual climate where professors of Germanistik still needed to justify their field's existence as an independent academic subject against the testy territoriality of Classical philologists, such a discussion of Classical sources offered a solid excuse for investigating a medieval English poet, and simultaneously fortified the scholarly reputation of the young, upstart journal promoting the academic study and classroom pedagogy of the 'New' languages and literatures. Seen from this limited angle, Chaucer, who can only call a small portion of his works 'his property' and who 'sedulously studied' and 'searched' the Classical poets' writings for plots and motifs, remains 'a poet who is fully part of the Middle Ages', while someone like Petrarch 'ushers in the transition to a 27 new age'. With Fiedler's 1844 translation and his 1847 essay, German Chaucer scholarship makes its entry into the area of source study, by this time already one of the prime areas of philological scholarship in Classical and German studies. 28 Only by such ostentatious concentration on philological matters, German Anglicists realized, would they ever find acknowledgment, representation, and funding at the research-oriented German universities. 29 In England, Fiedler's work was immediately received and reviewed. It suggested to surprised English university professors and private scholars alike that 'our German brothers' were about to 'teach us to read Chaucer, as they have already done much to make us understand Shakespeare' .30 27

Fiedler, 'Zur Beurtheilung', pp. 400--401. His orientation toward politically innocuous publication is also visible in his writing of a highly successful, two-tome Wissenschaftliche Grammatik der englischen Sprache, 2 vols (Zerbst: Kummer, 1849-50). 29 See Haenicke, Zur Geschichte der Anglistik, pp. 226-27, where he documents the Tübingen Classical philologists' resistance - in the 1860s - against the acceptance of the New philologies, because their goals were merely oriented toward practical language competency and lacked philological rigour. The relationship was still a topic of discussion around the tum of the century, as Felix Lindner's 'Die Stellung der neueren Philologie an den Universitiiten und ihr Verhiiltnis zur klassischen Philologie', Die Neueren Sprachen, 7 (1900), 561-67, indicates. Fiedler, in a review of G. Hemici's Ueber Sprachmengerei und Sprachreinigung (1848) for the Bliitter far literarische Unterhaltung (125 (1849), 499-50), accuses the author of lacking 'thoroughness' and 'scholarliness' (499) and ends by stating that Hemici's unscientific (that is, extra-discursive) book will do damage to the reputation ofits subject matter (500). 0 ' John Saunders, Cabinet Pictures of English Life: Chaucer (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1845), p. 5. Saunders refers for his source to 'a writer in a recent 28

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During the l 840s, there is an increased demand for a clear separation of the academic and non-academic study of English historical texts. When Adalbert (von) Keller, a Germanist, Romanist, and translator of Shakespeare, presents his inaugural speech as professor at the University of Tübingen in 1841, he critiques the dilettantish pragmatism of current university curricula. 31 German universities, unlike foreign ones, were not only professional schools which offered utilitarian skills to future civil servants, medical doctors, clergymen, and teachers. German universities were also academies of science in which the investigation of language and belles lettres found 'havens for free scientific scholarship, even if this scholarship did not have an immediate practical application' within state or church institutions (p. 14). Not yet oriented towards a strict specialization on individual national philologies, Keller recommends a 'modem literary history' which 'would mirror the rays of the entire culture of the modem world' (p. 14). Within this universal cultural history, the Middle Ages are of central importance because they provide the political, religious, and artistic 'foundations of our education' (p. 12). In 1847, Keller's student Carl Friedrich Elze, whom Ewald Flügel would later characterize - in contrast to his less professional English colleagues - as 'a student and critic rather than an antiquary or 32 collector' , decided to go one step beyond his teacher and develop a metacritical description and definition of philology. 33 Unfortunately, as the subtitle of his publication indicates, the text amounts to little more than a review of prior definitions and 'a suggestive attempt' to extend the application of existing definitions of (Classical) philology to the study of 'Germanie and Nordic' texts which are 'much more relevant' to the current religion, politics, law, and poetry than Greek and Roman ones (p. 9). number of the Foreign Quarter/y Review', who had informed his English readers 'that the gigantic labour of translation [of the Canterbury Tales] has just been accomplished by Edward Fiedler, whose "success in imitating not only Chaucer's language and style, but in embodying so much of the original author's spirit into his version, is so great, that we should not be surprised to find Chaucer speedily dividing with Shakspere the admiration and attention of our critical brethren in Germany'" (pp. 5-6.) 31 Inauguralrede über die Aufgabe der modernen Philologie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1842). 32 Anglia Beiblatt, 1 (1890-91), 3. 33 Über Philologie als System. Ein andeutender Versuch (Dessau: Karl Aue, 1847).

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Interestingly, his own version of philology as an all-encompassing 'historical science which investigates the manifestations of the human mind' (p. 20) still strives to construct a Romantic-organic scientific system within which the roles and functions of the enthusiastic artist and the distanced interpreter or critic are harmoniously united. To Elze, philology consists of more than formal hermeneutics and textual criticism; it also has an artistic component: 'Somebody might be very knowledgeable about the theory of both these [sub-disciplines] without being a fine exegete or critic. The opposite, however, is untrue. In fact, the interpreter and critic will be all the more an artist, the less he is conscious of philology as a system' (p. 41). Finally, Elze insists on the 'comparatist' nature ofphilology, even after it has been split up into 'Germanie or Indo-Germanic' (including English), 'Semitic', 'Romance', and 'Slavic' philologies, 'because criticism is the comparing and contemplating of the one in its relations with the other' (p. 45). Karl Mager, a school teacher, displays a similarly hopeful attitude toward the healthy coexistence of enthusiasm and scholarship. On the one hand, he proposes that mere language 'lecturers' or mere 'aesthetes, whom one could more profitably employ as court poets than as 'professors', should be replaced by a 'class of modem philologists' who would be able to instruct highly qualified school teachers in the modem languages and 34 literatures. On the other hand, he balances his demands for philologically trained professors and teachers by proposing a quite progressive university curriculum consisting not only of 'A. Language', 'B. Literature', but also of 'C. Life', by which he means that future teachers would be obliged to attend lectures in history, geography, jurisprudence, and political science. Moreover, his 'Literature' category contains 'aesthetics' and 'exercises in the artful (poetic and prosaic) use of the English and French languages' (pp. 112-13). Future definitions would retain less and less of such artistic, genial, enthusiastic, pedagogical, comparatist, and interdisciplinary aspects of philological work.

34 Karl E. W. Mager, Über Wesen, Einrichtung und piidagogische Bedeutung des schulmiij3igen Studiums der neueren Sprachen und der Mittel, ihm aufzuhelfen (Zurich: Meyer & Zeller, 1843), p. 22.

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