Philology and the Progress of Knowledge in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

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.