A true philologist is what friends will call a careful reader and enemies a pedant: someone who uses deep and broad knowledge and minimal prejudice to try to understand, down to the nuts and bolts, the commas and the words in italics, what a document is trying to tell us.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Monday, September 21, 2026
A True Philologist
Joshua T. Katz, "Fit as a philologist," New Criterion (September 8, 2026):