Sex and Scholarship

This chapter looks at examples of scholars who, in the early eighteenth century, worked on texts that were highly controversial from a moral perspective. The focus is on Pieter Burman’s edition of Petronius (1709) and Bentley’s work on Horace. Looking at this material from a perspective of textual criticism allowed Burman and Bentley to avoid delving too deeply into passages of a sexually loaded nature. Nevertheless, political and scholarly opponents of both men tried to blacken their reputation by connecting their research interests with their private lives. It is demonstrated that the association of textual critics with immorality was a commonplace in early modern Europe and that the tensions between in particular Burman and his opponents reveals a struggle to make classical philology a more independent field of enquiry versus other disciplines, such as theology.

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’.

Conclusion

The final chapter summarizes the findings of the preceding chapters and offers an epilogue on how the tension between different approaches to classical literature has parallels in the nineteenth century. It is argued that the debates described in the monograph between the ‘Dutch School’ (philologia) focusing on textual problems and the ‘French School’ (philosophia) focusing on moral issues had no clear winners. Rather they led, on the one hand, to a more technical and professional approach to the study of ancient texts and, on the other hand, to the continued popularity of classical ideas and models of moral virtue in the eighteenth century thanks to more accessible works of ‘popular’ scholarship.

The Quest for Civic Virtue

This chapter focuses on those eighteenth-century students of ancient history and literature who were mainly interested in Latin and Greek writings as moral edification. Recent decades have witnessed a growing awareness of the role played by models drawn from classical antiquity in the advancement of the concept of politeness in the eighteenth century. Much less attention has been paid to the connection between the popularizing works on antiquity that were read by the social and intellectual elites to form a conception of these classical models and contemporary scholarly debates. In order to tackle this question, I will discuss two eighteenth-century bestsellers. The first of these was the History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero by Conyers Middleton (1683–1750) and the second was the Histoire Romaine (1738–48) by the Jansenist Charles Rollin (1661–1741). Although these men had vastly different religious outlooks—Middleton was a deist and Rollin a Jansenist—they each made an important contribution to the popularization of classical culture in the eighteenth century. It will be demonstrated that the life and work of both men was deeply influenced by the moralizing and popularizing approach to classical texts (philosophia), and that they created a conception of antiquity that found its way into the works of some of the foremost philosophes of the eighteenth century, such as Voltaire and Montesquieu.

The Construction of Humanism

This chapter starts with a very concise discussion of how the different approaches to classical literature debated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be traced back to the ancient world and the Middle Ages. The rest of the chapter demonstrates how scholars in the early eighteenth century reflected on the work of their predecessors from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries based on their own scholarly concerns. The first example is Pieter Burman (1668–1741) and his Sylloge epistolarum (1724–7), the edition of unpublished writings by the French critic Henri Valois (1603–76; edition published in 1740), and the edition of George Buchanan (1506–82), published in 1725. In the Sylloge, for example, Burman focuses on letters that show how eminent scholars thought about the correct reading of classical texts, while a ‘popularizer’ like Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) is criticized. Valois’s work was used as a starting point to reflect on what Burman and his nephew Pieter Burman the Younger (1713–78) saw as the downfall of French textual criticism. Finally, Burman’s own interest in the stylistic and rhetorical aspects of texts also allowed him to avoid involvement in politically sensitive matters, as was the case for Buchanan’s views in contemporary Scotland. The final example discussed in this chapter is the prefatory material written by Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) for the edition of Erasmus’ Opera omnia (1703–6), in which Le Clerc dwells on the relationship between the study of ancient literature and other academic disciplines such as philosophy and theology.