Philology, Queen of Science: The Making of a Knowledge System in the 19th Century

If philology was queen of the sciences in the 19th century, this project surveys her kingdom. PhiQoS examines its fields, labourers, and idols, its modes of exchange and structures of organisation, as well as its internal conflicts and alliances together with rivals elsewhere over the long 19th century. This historical project sets at its core the entanglement and separation of humanistic disciplines as well as the pasts forgotten or disavowed by philology's new historiographers. Indeed, despite rising interest in the history of philology, and even calls for its return, fragmented contemporary research has been unable to account for the articulation of a huge range of humans and objects, practices and ideas, infrastructure and technology into philology – as an integrated system of knowledge-production. Ultimately, PhiQoS reflects the premise that networks of knowledge-production obscure their making, erase their sources, suspend their difference, and rationalize their heterogeneity.