Around 1750, the word “philology” started to appear more and more often in English texts. To explain why, this article examines how writers of the time invoked philology and its derived terms. In today’s histories of philology, the time before 1780 is often a prelude to philology’s custodianship of language study in the nineteenth century and its transformation into the humanities; thus, philological practices prefiguring those later developments are thrust to the foreground. However, from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the 1780s, philology was about the origin and progress of any part of knowledge, a tradition this article ultimately traces to the literary history outlined by Francis Bacon in 1605. Missing from the history of philology as it currently stands, this once-prevalent philology of knowledge offers lessons for those who ponder the resonances between philology and literary studies today.
Pound's Provencal translations ‘Homage a la Langue d’Oc' and ‘L’Aura Amara' (1918) are characterised by his deployment of philological objects and reading practices against orders of knowledge produced by philological institutions (the ‘Germano-American university’) in order to see whether and how philology might be poetically ‘redeemed’. He used the Scots glossary of a 1710 reprint of Gavin Douglas's Eneados – a Middle Scots translation of the Aeneid – to supply vocabulary for these translations. Read alongside that glossary and ‘Provincialism the Enemy’ (Pound's 1917 diatribe against philology), Pound's translations were an intervention against the prevailing philological model of knowledge he and others identified with the nationalism and racism of the Second German Empire. However, his work on Cavalcanti in the late 1920s, some of which appeared in Guido Cavalcanti Rime (1932), arguably adopted the philological tendencies excoriated in ‘Provincialism’. Amid current interest in philology as a historical discipline, these poems offer an example of negotiations between poetry and philology. The concept of philological poetry offers an account of such negotiations across periods amid pedagogical institutional contexts.
