Renewed Philology
Renewed Philology is an
international working group of scholars in biblical studies whose work
reflects critically on the intellectual frameworks brought to bear in
philological practice. The work of this group is diverse in its
interests, interdisciplinary in its readings of ancient texts and the
recovery of ancient world-views, and meta-critical in its practices. We
are comprised of a core group of researchers and are supported by a broader advisory board.
Learn more about us
Why we started this group
The systematic study of language, literature,
their reception and their transmission has been central to education and
intellectual activity since the development of the written word itself.
Philology has been foundational to approaches to the past and the
development of ideas about the present.
In the history of ideas, the scholarly and
pedagogical activities that are constitutive of philology have been
essential in the formation of our identities through ancient texts and
in situating and reintroducing the past during the Renaissance and
Enlightenment.
In the modern academy, scholars from different
disciplines apply similar methodologies on sometimes vastly different
corpora. But sometimes ongoing work in subjects and cultures from
Ancient Mesopotamia through Modern Germany labors without the benefit of
a deep understanding of philology’s own history as a discipline and in
particular, the inequalities its ways of knowing have historically
produced.
We seek to reshape philology’s future through
understanding its past. Through our work, we hope to renew the value of
careful attention to language and the cultural values encoded in
language and discover forgotten or overlooked lines of inquiry within
philological practices. Faculty and students working in diverse
disciplines stand to benefit from learning about each other’s work in
philology inside and outside the classroom. While our focus is
specifically on biblical philology and the unique challenges faced to
the study of these corpora, our group is engaged with ongoing work in
other philological disciplines.
What we are interested in
We are particularly concerned with what biblicists
(and practitioners of other related areas) mean when they speak of
“philology,” as both a set of reading practices and an integrated theory
of language. We are interested broadly in interventions in philology
and its historical-critical posture that reflect critically upon gender,
race, class, religious identity, and other subject positions embedded
in the intellectual frameworks we bring to bear when we do philological
work.
We are interested in posing broad questions of
ancient texts and the cultures that are reflected in and constructed by
them, such as notions of artistic production, beauty, truth, justice,
transmission, personhood, the self and the other, identity, community,
and the religious imagination.
To learn more, see our recommended further reading.
What we do
The members of this group are engaged in a number
of research projects, devise and convene a number of activities under
the mantle of Renewed Philology.
Core members of this group
are founders and chairs of key program units within the Society of
Biblical Literature, including Philology in Hebrew Studies and Book
History program units.
Our first conference, Legendary Characters: Attribution and Personhood in Jewish Antiquity, was convened at Princeton University in April 2019. Learn more about recent and upcoming events.
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