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Literary Historicism: Romanticism, Philologists, and the Presence of the Past

Between 1780 and 1840 a huge rediscovery of the early medieval vernacular roots and rootedness of the various European languages and literatures took place, in a process that reverberated back and forth between the fields of philology, antiquarianism, and imaginative literature. It revolutionized the European self-image and historical consciousness and led to the national diffraction of the Enlightenment’s idea of culture and literature. Instead of one European culture cradled in classical antiquity, people came to envisage a plurality of European cultures, each rooted in the nation’s vernacular and tribal origins. It was as if, in the words of one worried Oxford professor, those philologists who were “nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and the AngloSaxons,” were “about to reverse the renaissance.”1 I wish to view this “reversal of the renaissance” in a fresh light, as a period and condition that might be called literary historicism.