English philology essay

Tell us about your first book, the three-volume Ptolemaic Alexandria by P.M. Fraser. Hellenistic Alexandria — the Greek-speaking new capital of Egypt that was founded by Alexander the Great and then came under the control of one of his leading generals, Ptolemy — became the first center of scholarship of what we now call philology.

Most of the texts that concern philologists — from ancient Alexandria up to the late 16th and 17th centuries — were classical Greek and Roman texts. The study of those texts focused on trying to emend the damage done to texts as they were copied over time, or on understanding what the writers were trying to say.

Many of the fundamental methods and innovations that established philology occurred in and around two particular institutions that the Ptolemaic kings (all named Ptolemy, from 323 BC down to the Roman conquest of the 1st century) created.

Intellectual historian James Turner describes how the once vast and unified field of philology was chopped up in the 20th century to make the different disciplines of the humanities. W hat is philology? In the 20th century the understanding of philology narrowed considerably.