Floris Verhaart's magisterial book is a study of profound continuity and perennial conflict. Put another way, it explores how conflict itself—over the relationship between scholarship and society—has woven a stubborn thread of continuity throughout intellectual history. What is the proper audience of scholarship? Should scholars speak primarily to fellow scholars, or instead address wider non-academic publics? For instance, should classicists focus on technical issues of textual criticism and philology, or instead distill ethical or political lessons from ancient texts, and communicate these insights to non-experts? This conflict has expressed itself through many dichotomies: words versus things, form versus content, erudition versus exemplarity, or (as Verhaart explores at length) philologia versus philosophia.
Verhaart reconstructs the salience of these questions in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century Europe, a tumultuous moment long characterized in the language of warfare and crisis (e.g., the “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns” in France, the “battle of the books” in England, or Paul Hazard's “crisis of European consciousness”). He places the squabbles of this period's classical scholars within a longue durée history of the aforementioned conflict. His book vividly brings this age to life, while sensitively highlighting the human dimensions of scholarly labor. He embraces an impressive transnational scope: Dutch, French, and British scholars—including Pieter Burman the Elder, Jean Le Clerc, Richard Bentley, Conyers Middleton, Anne and André Dacier, and Charles Rollin, among others—appear throughout. His book forms an important contribution to a growing literature that is reimagining the relationship between the Enlightenment and its Renaissance humanist antecedents. As Verhaart remarks: “the example of classical scholarship shows the eighteenth century did not mark a clean break with the past but was an age in which innovation was often introduced with an appeal to earlier times” (11).
Chapter 1, “Introduction,” begins with a case study in scholarly invective: Le Clerc attacked Burman for working on salacious material, such as the Roman author Petronius, and Burman responded by publishing Bentley's anonymous catalogue of 323 text-critical errors that Le Clerc had made in his publication of moralizing maxims from Menander and Philemon. Verhaart uses this squabble in the republic of letters to define “two opposing schools” of classical scholarship. The so-called Dutch School focused on grammar, textual criticism, and occasionally rhetoric, whereas the French School came to prefer the moral contents of texts. In addition to introducing the conceit of the conflict between philologia and philosophia, derived from Seneca, this chapter also discusses the book's methodological interventions—in debates over the public sphere, the role of paratextuality in book history, and the cultural turn in the history of scholarship.
Chapter 2, “The Construction of Humanism,” traces an important though oft-neglected phenomenon: how scholars in this transitional moment received and repackaged their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanist predecessors. Verhaart traces everything from Burman's critique of Justus Lipsius and praise of Henri Valois to his tiptoeing around political questions in his edition of George Buchanan. This chapter likewise discusses Le Clerc's celebration of Erasmus as an exemplar of a golden age of Renaissance scholarship. As Verhaart remarks, “the writings and publications of the dead were therefore shamelessly exploited to promote contemporaries’ own aims” (36).
Chapter 3, “Sex and Scholarship,” offers an innovative analysis of the fraught relationship between classical philology and the public sphere. It begins by examining allegations of sexual transgressions in Burman's own life, and the manner in which his opponents used his work on Petronius as further evidence of his sexual immorality. Verhaart also shows how this controversy mapped onto intra-Protestant conflicts in the United Provinces, and trickled down into vernacular pamphlets and plays. Shifting the focus to England, he likewise examines attacks against Bentley's conduct as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and their connection to his work on Horace. Particularly illuminating is the chapter's discussion of the economics of university education, and the shifting status of philology vis-à-vis theology faculties. As philology professionalized, it also contended with attacks that judged it inherently immoral.
Chapter 4, “The Quest for Civic Virtue,” explores how moralizing approaches to the past shaped eighteenth-century perceptions of antiquity. Verhaart analyzes Conyers Middleton's use of Cicero to promote deism and Le Clerc's construction of Socrates as an anticipator of Christianity. He also profiles the French Jansenist Charles Rollin, who valorized Cicero for his religiosity, rather than his rationality, and proposed Roman civic virtue as an antidote to the problem of self-love. Finally, Verhaart charts the influence of Rollin and Middleton on Enlightenment figures like Montesquieu and Voltaire.
The conclusion looks forward to the legacies of the book's themes, from Edward Gibbon to nineteenth-century German scholarship. Verhaart's erudite and illuminating work is itself a fitting synthesis of philologia and philosophia. Not only will it be essential reading for early modern intellectual historians and students of classical reception, but it also offers important insights to anyone pondering the present state and future directions of the humanities, whether within the academy or beyond.
