Comparative Histories of Philological Practices: Pitfalls and Promises

For the past five years, I have been involved in a very large collaborative project: The Princeton Lexicon of Philological Practices, under the general editorship of Glenn Most and Martin Kern. The Lexicon has twenty-five areas, each devoted to a different textual tradition from across the globe, from Japan to Maya and from antiquity to the present. Each area has a historical introduction, followed by circa thirty key emic terms from within the tradition in question for its own philological practices, agents, materials, genres. Together with Jacqueline Vayntrub (Yale Divinity School), I have been editing the Hebrew section.

The primary motivations for this project are (1) our awareness that for over two centuries the Western academic study of textual traditions from around the world has been framed by the normative model, conceptual toolkit, and learned traditions of Classical (Greek and Latin) philology; (2) the fact that non-European textual traditions have (at best imperfectly translatable) technical vocabularies of their own for the philological practices, agents, and genres of their traditions; (3) the conviction that such vocabularies are indispensable keys to understanding those traditions' understanding of themselves as such; and (4), the hope that a critical inventory of such terms would provide an invaluable vademecum for the surge in comparative historical studies of philological traditions.

As it nears completion, this presentation will discuss The Princeton Lexicon of Philological Practices and, through my own work on the Hebrew section, discuss some of the ways it promises to contribute to the globalisation of philological scholarship in our own time.