Fragments and ruins …

… A kingdom in splinters by Eric Ormsby - The New Criterion.

… traditional philology nowadays is less a ruin than the shadow of a ruin; no, even less than that, the vestige of a shadow. Turner acknowledges, and laments, this from the outset; he notes that “many college-educated Americans no longer recognize the word.” He adds that, “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?” Worse, “it totters along with arthritic creakiness.” With friends like these, we might ask, can philology sink any further into oblivion than it already has? But the unspoken question here—“shall these bones live?”—is one that Turner poses and resolves triumphantly. He breathes life back into philology. There is not a dull page in this long book (and I include here its sixty-five pages of meticulous and sometimes mischievous endnotes). He accomplishes this by setting his account firmly in a detailed if inevitably brisk historical narrative interspersed with vivid cameos of individual scholars, the renowned as well as the notorious, the plainly deranged alongside the truly radiant.