Sell all the books you have which purport to explain the nature of the academic disciplines and buy James Turner's Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. If you want to understand higher education in its current configuration of departments, divisions, and professional associations, I can commend no better book.

To begin, however, we must overcome the smug sense of superiority that sneaks over us when we read the one-word title of this tome. As Turner concedes: "for most of the twentieth century, philology was put down, kicked around, abused, and snickered at, as the archetype of crabbed, dry-as-dust, barren, and by and large pointless academic knowledge. Did I mention mind-numbingly boring?"

We need to get back before that sneer. Philology was once the most capacious of terms. As it encompassed all study of languages and texts, it was at the heart of education and scholarship, reigning as "king of the sciences." Turner's study is dazzling in its scope and erudition, and one manifestation of this is that he starts his story at the dawn of civilization: "The earliest schools, in Mesopotamia, taught not augury, astrology, or the art of war but how to handle written language." In the beginning was the word.

With an eye for detail and a ready wit, Turner uncovers how a wide range of modern academic disciplines—history, literature, classics, art history, linguistics, archaeology, social and cultural anthropology, biblical studies, and religious studies—are a cousinhood all descending from philology (sometimes together with its junior partners, rhetoric and antiquarianism).

Two revealing themes recur: first, just how young these modern disciplines are—often not firmly established until into the 20th century—and, relatedly, how intertwined they once were. (In the first half of the 19th century, Karl Morgenstern was Professor of Eloquence and Classical Philology, of Aesthetics, and of the History of Literature and Art—just one colorful illustration of how things could look before the tapestry was unwoven.)

Moreover, grasping their origins in philology makes many puzzling things about these disciplines explicable. To wit, wishing to remain in continuity with their training and roots, once it became clear that the human story was much older than had hitherto been thought, historians quietly decided that "history" nevertheless begins with those who had the art of writing: what happened to homo sapiens in those vast ages before literacy was dubbed "prehistory" and outsourced to archaeologists and anthropologists.

During my doctoral work in history at a British university, I once included in the first draft of a paper some drawings from my period of study as additional primary sources. The professor who evaluated it instructed me to take out the "pretty pictures": real historians find their evidence in texts, not images. (As I do not have the space to compress Turner's arguments here, if you want to know why art history and archaeology are nonetheless also heirs of philology, you will need to heed the philological maxim ad fontes and read the book yourself.)

It also becomes clearer why the main professional society for classicists in the United States today is called the American Philological Association. Likewise, I finally understand why C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (who are not mentioned in this book) thought that it was essential for Oxford undergraduates reading Literature to learn Anglo-Saxon (Old English). I had always taken this to be a Star-Trek-fandom-like, male-obsessional-activities kind of loopiness.

Thomas Jefferson both taught himself Anglo-Saxon and included it in the curriculum he envisioned for the University of Virginia. He was such a philological enthusiast that he and another future president, James Madison, went on a research trip to an Unquachog village in order to attempt to record a dying Native American language, Quiripi, before its last three speakers passed away.

Philology loomed so large for the educated classes that an ancient language would suddenly become fashionable in society. The vogue for Norse was a manifestation of a crush on the Vikings, who were adored for a season as "irresistibly bold, blond, and berserk." The storied languages of the East had their moment as well. The poet Karoline von GÜnderode was so determined to go out in style that she even wrote her suicide note in Sanskrit.

Alas for the advance of scholarship in the English-speaking world, German was a fashion that was slow to be adopted. At one point in the early 19th century, there was not a single member of the faculty of the University of Cambridge who could read it. England's greatest philologist at the start of that century, Richard Porson—languages being his expertise notwithstanding—reputedly pronounced: "Life is too short to learn German."

What goes on in modern English departments has long confused me, and Turner's narrative has been a tremendous help in understanding some of the crosscurrents which make that world appear chaotic. For example, some have conceived of it as an area of technical research while others as about character formation and inspiration, "a tool for civilizing elite young barbarians." Turner also helpfully identifies three different tasks pursued under the general category of literary studies—textual criticism, evaluative criticism, and literary history—and I now realize how often I have been bewildered by expecting one of these and encountering another.

A study of the history of philology also makes the humanities seem like a modern nation-state whose political boundaries have been drawn with disregard to natural ones. Philosophy is not part of this cousinhood, but it is nevertheless now assumed to be a quintessential humanities discipline, while cultural anthropology—a blood relation—has ended up in the foster care of the social sciences. Never mind that The Golden Bough, the most influential work of anthropology in the early decades of the twentieth century (and indeed perhaps of all time), was written by the Cambridge classicist James Frazer.

Did I mention mind-invigoratingly entertaining? Turner can size someone up in a delightfully drawn sketch. Here is his one-sentence portrait of a philologist behind the project that became the Oxford English Dictionary: "Furnivall gained a reputation for hot pink neckties, sculling on the Thames with shopgirls, and hours toiling over manuscripts in the British Museum." And here is all you need to know about the members of the Free Church of Scotland: "a highly literate, highly orthodox folk who could sniff out heresy faster than a border collie could smell a wolf." The radical Unitarian Theodore Parker was making early forays into what would emerge as the field of comparative religion: "He saw Hinduism as an improvement over Presbyterianism."

Turner's magnum opus is bejeweled with eye-catching facts. Philology was once so popular that Hugh Blair was paid £1,500 by his publisher for the manuscript of his grippingly entitled Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783)—"something like two or three million dollars in today's earnings." If the word "philology" has taken on a somewhat pejorative tinge, spare a thought for the poor gentlemen who signaled their commitment to learning by founding the Society of Dilettanti. Oxford's famous Bodleian Library was initially envisioned as a Protestant polemical weapon with which to beat "the Papists." In 1317, Albertino Mussato became the first person since antiquity to celebrate his birthday.

Not to be outdone by Jefferson and Madison's services to the cause of philology, yet another future president, John Quincy Adams, was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. A window into what the world was like before professionalization set in, the 14-volume Cambridge Modern History (1902 - 12) was repeatedly criticized because its authors included "too many professors."

An epilogue makes it clear that Turner's tale has a lesson to teach. He finds our current disciplinary boundaries stifling, and his well-reasoned narrative has proven that they are intellectually indefensible. They are not about scholarly coherence but rather proprietary claims: "By teaching students under these new labels, and by spawning learned journals specific to them, they marked off each field of philological or postphilological study as an independent realm, like male marmots flagging with urine the boundaries of their territories."

Sometimes, I must admit, I found myself less enamored than Turner apparently is with the good old days when Dante scholars also pontificated on ancient coins and people wrote books such as Natural and Civil History of Vermont which covered both maple trees and legislative branches, but he is certainly right to observe that artificial barriers have been erected: "If the lines were real, disciplines would not need so relentlessly to police their borders within colleges and universities."

I know the case of an assistant professor of classics who was told that he was not allowed to offer courses which used works in translation as the English Department held exclusive rights to this domain. When a classics professor who knows Latin is not deemed officially competent to teach an English translation of Vergil, but a literary scholar who does not is, one begins to lose the scent of the true flower of learning and starts to catch a whiff of something that smells suspiciously like it was deposited by a groundhog. If Turner's admonition is to be heeded, the humanities will need to relearn how to be kissing rather than pissing cousins.

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College. His sixth monograph is The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith, due in August from Oxford University Press.

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