PHILOLOGY, THE CRISIS OF THE HUMANITIES, AND A COMMENT ON "ANGLO-SAXON" IDENTITY

James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) (From the book jacket: "Many today do not recognize the word, but 'philology' was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all of other studies of language and literature, as well as religion, history, culture, art, archaeology, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word? In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of language and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university. . . . The humanities today face a crisis of relevance, of not of meaning and purpose. Understanding their common origins--and what they still share--has never been more urgent." Let me suggest that law as an intellectual discipline faces the same crisis of relevance, meaning and purpose, as does the humanities. Law as a practicing profession faces its own crisis, but not ones of relevance, meaning and purpose: as long as people disagree and decide to settle their disagreement other than by mortal combat, lawyers will have a purpose, some relevance, and some meaning. But law as a practicing profession (including the bulk of what is taught in law schools) is not law as an intellectual discipline. The former being pretty much non-, if not anti-intellectual, the latter being very much grounded in the intellectual life. From the text: "Once again nationalism field philology; and, once again, language, race, and fanciful identities ran together. In King Alfred's day lay the time-shrouded origins of English future, society, polity. In 1849 'Anglo-Saxon' Kemble told Jacob Grimm, 'We Englishmen, tho' we do not read Anglo[-Saxon] much, are beginning to feel very proud of our Teutonic element.' The last three words were key. In the nineteenth century a stronger stress fell on Germanic ancestors as foundation of Englishness. Nor were imagined Angles and Saxons the only Teutonic for in English genealogy. (Few historians today would bet on Angles and Saxons ever having existed as distinct peoples swarming into England.) Vikings--irresistibly bold, blond, and berserk--had conquered northern and eastern England in the ninth century. They settled in large numbers in this so-called Danelaw (i.e., where laws of the Danes ruled); and they contributed to England's vocabulary as well as its gene pool. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles despised the pagan Vikings. Victorians loved them. (Vikings also founded Dublin but without elevating English opinion of the Irish.) Well-educated English people added Norsemen to their national lineage, adopted eddas as an honorary Anglo-Saxon literary genre."  "Many 'old-stock' white Americans, too, started to see 'Anglo-Saxon' as a badge of identity (Viking not so often). Anglo-Saxon fervor rose in the 1840s, in the face of two antitypes: hungry Celtic immigrants pouring in from Ireland and Mexican soldier fighting in the Mexican-American War. . . ."  Id. at 154.).