Philological Observation

Investigators of nature use iconic instruments to make visible their objects of study. This book is about a particular piece of equipment which supports the observation of texts--the dictionary. Christian Flow examines some of the most ambitious Latin dictionaries of the last five centuries, ending with the Thesaurus linguae Latinae--a monumental attempt, underway since the 1890s, to write the history of the Latin language from millions of example citations. In this telling, the Thesaurus' foundation is placed in and against a Renaissance tradition that took the lexicon as a tool made for (and by) "observation." It becomes a way of historicizing the enterprise of textual scholars--philologists--to reveal previously unseen features in the relicts of an ancient tongue. Physicians had their case studies; physiologists had their microscopes; astronomers their telescopes. Philologists had their lexica. Philological Observation offers an investigation of visual apprehension centered not on artists or natural scientists but on textual scholars, showing how the problem of trained sight has united philologists with an array of other scientific practitioners, from physicians to statisticians to forestry officials. Beginning in the Renaissance, this book adjusts our understanding of textual scholars' role in the early modern re-discovery of empiricism and the modern turn to Big Science. It also reveals the vexed relationship between what it meant for Renaissance-era scholars to "see" the evidence for Latin usage and what such "observation" entailed--materially and conceptually--for their successors centuries later in Munich or Berlin. In ways tacit and explicit, theoretical and material, the modern philological observers at the Thesaurus were very different sorts of characters from their early modern counterparts. But they remained haunted by many of the same problems.