Introduction
This chapter introduces the debate on classical learning, as well as some of the key players in these debates, such as Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736), Pieter Burman (1668–1741), Richard Bentley (1662–1742), and Charles Rollin (1661–1741), against the background of the culture wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The opposing approaches to Latin and Greek texts are discussed. On the one hand, we find a more text-critically oriented focus that was associated by contemporaries with scholars either operating in the United Provinces or in close contact with Dutch peers. The other approach was associated with French scholars and focused on the historical and moral content of texts. This opposition is helpful in understanding the culture wars at the turn of the eighteenth century as it guards us from simplifying the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns to a straightforward clash between ‘old’ and ‘new’.