A New Field: History of Humanities

Rens Bod
Julia Kursell
Jaap Maat
Thijs Weststeijn

T
hese are exciting times for the humanities. The impressive corpus of knowl-
edge that the humanities have discovered, created, and cultivated over many
centuries is available for the benefit of more people than ever and evolving rap-
idly. Fresh perspectives open up as digital tools enable researchers to explore questions
that not long ago were beyond their reach and even their imagination. Novel fields of
research deal with phenomena emerging in a globalizing culture, enabling us to make
sense of the way in which new media affect our lives. Cross-fertilization between dis-
ciplines leads to newly developed methods and results, such as the complex chemical
analysis of the materials of ancient artworks, yielding data that were unavailable to
both artists and their publics at the time of production, or neuroscientific experiments
shedding new light on our capacity for producing and appreciating music.
At the same time, there is a sense of gloom, perhaps even crisis, among those who
are convinced that the humanities are valuable, precious, indispensable. The number
of students taking humanities courses declines, and humanities departments at univer-
sities worldwide are subject to severe budget cuts or abolition altogether. In a period in
which the academic world is plagued by governments insisting on measurable results
for the sake of short-term financial profit, the humanities seem most vulnerable.
We present the first issue of History of Humanities with feelings of anticipation.
Our journal is meant to stand for the fact that scholarly practices of a type today la-
beled “humanities” have been an essential part of the process of knowledge making
ever since human inquisitiveness sought to enhance our understanding of the world
and ourselves. This long history has been studied in fruitful and illuminating ways,
but the focus has been on either the natural sciences or on single disciplines within
the humanities, such as history writing and linguistics. The fundamental contribu-
tion of the humanities to the intricate web of knowledge that scholars, thinkers, and
researchers have spun in the course of several millennia has thus been poorly recog-

History of Humanities, Volume 1, Number 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/685056

© 2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 2379-3163/2016/0101-0001$10.00
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2 | HISTORY OF HUMANITIES SPRING 2016

nized and is consequently undervalued. We intend to redress the imbalance in the his-
toriography of the search for knowledge that mankind has been engaged in for so long.
A more balanced picture, we believe, will show that the ways we arrive at knowledge
are complex, varied, and unpredictable and often involve the transmission of methods
and insights from one field of investigation to another.
The humanities have always been strong in reflecting on their own history and have
sometimes even defined themselves as primarily concerned with the history and his-
toricity of human endeavors. However, our motive for starting a journal devoted to the
history of the humanities is not nostalgia. Instead we see a potential for a large com-
munity of scholars and researchers to make their cause more tangible through re-
flecting on their own history in a new constellation. We invite contributions on as
many aspects of the history of the humanities as possible. Authors can discuss the
histories of the study of the visual and literary arts, of language and music, of thinking,
and of the past, to name but several central subjects. These studies stretch from ancient
times up to the present, and they can be found in different regions across the globe.
A platform of this sort is called for in view of both the positive and negative trends
in today’s humanities, and we hope that it will strengthen the voice of the humanities
in the academic discourse at large. First attempts to bring together historians of the
humanities took shape as a series of four conferences, “The Making of the Humani-
ties,” in Amsterdam (2008, 2010) and Rome (2012, 2014). This is now followed by a
series of annual meetings that will take place in Baltimore (2016), Oxford (2017),
and Beijing (2018). Having published The Making of the Humanities, a trilogy of se-
lected papers from the first conferences, we decided as a next step to found History of
Humanities.1 We have witnessed how scholars worldwide are forming a vibrant com-
munity of historians of humanities, a process that recently resulted in the founding of
the Society for the History of the Humanities.2

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY “HUMANITIES”?

TOWARD A DEFINITION
It is probably impossible to give a definition of the term humanities that would cover a
category of practices, or objects of study, that remains fixed throughout all periods of
intellectual activity across the world. In the European tradition alone, classifications of

1. The Making of the Humanities, vol. 1, Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2010); vol. 2, From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2012); and vol. 3, The Modern Humanities (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014).
2. See http://historyofhumanities.org/.
 INTRODUCTION | 3

fields and disciplines have been many and diverse. Activities that may in hindsight be
seen as belonging to a single discipline have migrated between categories. Aristotle’s
distinction between his Organon (works on logic), on the one hand, and the theoret-
ical, practical, and productive sciences, on the other, existed alongside categorizations
motivated by pedagogy, such as the Hellenistic enkyklios paideia and the late Roman
artes liberales. A key moment as far as terminology is concerned was Coluccio Salutati’s
(1331–1406) defense of the studia humanitatis as a coherent and independent field: the
secular study of grammar, rhetoric, poetics, history, and moral philosophy, complemen-
tary to the studia divinitatis, or Biblical scholarship. When fifteenth-century Italian uni-
versities adopted the curriculum of the studia humanitatis, its supporters were called
umanisti, giving rise to the terms humanist and, later, humanism.3
It is an open question whether or not the humanities as a whole can be distin-
guished from other groups of disciplines, such as the natural or the social sciences,
on the basis of a specific method or object of study. A strong conceptual division be-
tween a science of the human and a science of nature dates back at least to Giambattista
Vico’s (1668–1744) Scienza Nuova of 1725. In the late nineteenth century, Wilhelm
Dilthey (1833–1911) authoritatively distinguished the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften)
from the sciences (Naturwissenschaften) with regard both to the methods and to the
objects studied. Rather than explaining (erklären) the world in terms of countable and
measurable regularities, the humanities attempt to understand (verstehen) the inten-
tions of historical actors; the specific objects investigated by the humanities are “the
expressions of the human mind.”4 Over the twentieth century, other categories were
introduced in addition to the humanities and the sciences, in particular the social sci-
ences (or human sciences), which study human behavior in its social context. While
these divisions are not stable, Dilthey’s definition covers by and large the disciplines
that are today referred to by the term humanities at continental European univer-
sities, including in languages other than German or English—for example, scienze
umanistiche in Italian, humanités in French, humaniora in the Dutch and Scandina-
vian languages, and gumanitarnyje nauki in Russian.
If we move outside Europe, the picture obviously becomes more complicated. It
has been argued that Islamic scholarship formed the basis for the studia humanitatis:
the studia adabiya included grammar and lexicography, poetry, rhetoric, history, and

3. For the history of the word humanist, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Humanism and Scholasticism
in the Italian Renaissance,” Byzantion 17 (1944–45): 346–74.
4. Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das
Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883), 29.
4 | HISTORY OF HUMANITIES SPRING 2016

moral philosophy.5 But China, for one, presents a different picture: the “six arts” that
Confucius identified with genteel education were rites and rituals, music, archery,
charioteering, calligraphy and writing, and mathematics (or prediction). Another an-
cient Chinese practice, to treat literature, philosophy, and history (the triad wen-shi-zhe)
as one body of knowledge, was revived in the nineteenth century under the header
of guoxue (national studies). Guoxue was intended as a counterweight to the term
renwen, a calque of the Japanese denomination for the Western category “humanities”
(as different from the social and natural sciences). In fact, however, renwen—the term
still used today—was a retranslation, since the Japanese compound was originally de-
rived from the Chinese Book of Changes.6
Looking at the term humanities from a systematic perspective, we encounter yet
another challenge. Although (and because) the journal aims at the broadest possible
audience in its endeavor to contribute to a new field, it appears in a single language.
Choosing English as the lingua franca entails many risks, some of which have become
apparent in this first issue. In modern English, for one, the division between the hu-
manities and the sciences is emphasized by the terminology itself. Yet in many other
languages there is a single term, such as Wissenschaft in German, scienza in Italian, or
nauka in Russian, that denotes the study of both the natural and the human world. In
German and Italian, Literaturwissenschaft and scienza della letteratura are common
terms. The emphasis in English on the difference between humanities and sciences
suggests that methods do not easily migrate between these spheres of knowledge. This
may be partly responsible for the tendency of English-speaking scholarship to associ-
ate the humanities with historical approaches, rather than analytical ones that study
their objects independently of the historical and cultural background. By contrast,
the humanities outside the United States and Britain have frequently depended on an-
alytical, nonhistorical methods: famous examples include the Vienna School of art his-
tory, Russian formalism, and French structuralism.
Our terminological challenges do not end with this alleged contrast between sci-
ences and humanities. Another hurdle consists in an ambiguity of the latter term itself.
In English, humanities can refer both to the study of the products of the human mind
and to these products themselves. We do not intend to include historical studies of lit-
erature, music, theater, or the visual arts; rather, we aim at the history of the studies

5. George Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West: With Special
Reference to Scholasticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990).
6. Hsiung Ping-chen, “The Evolution of Chinese Humanities,” American Historical Review 120,
no. 4 (2015): 1267–82; Perry Johansson, “Cross-Cultural Epistemology: How European Sinology Be-
came the Bridge to China’s Modern Humanities,” in The Making of the Humanities, 3:449–64; and Arif
Dirlik, ed., “The National Learning Revival,” special issue of China Perspectives 1 (2011).
 INTRODUCTION | 5

carried out on literature, music, theater, and the visual arts. This does not mean that we
ignore that the arts themselves have often played a role in research and in the acqui-
sition of knowledge.

SCOPE OF THE JOURNAL

No earlier journal has assembled scholarly studies on the history of the humanities dis-
ciplines across time and place. We thus believe it is not up to us to formulate rules for
good practice in the history of humanities. Some of our contributors will find it legit-
imate to compare methods or principles stemming from different regions or periods;
in the humanities, just as in the sciences, historical actors have applied practices, meth-
ods, and principles invented for specific disciplines to problems in other disciplines
(sometimes by wilfully ignoring the original historical or religious contexts of these
inventions). But other authors in History of Humanities may instead wish to highlight
cultural incommensurabilities (and identify, for instance, the problems incurred when
Western methods have been applied to the study of African literature or Chinese art).7
We are aware that referring to the study of music and the study of art in Greek or
Chinese antiquity with terms such as musicology and art history may entail a lapse into
Eurocentric presentism in which the past and the foreign are interpreted in terms of
current concepts and perspectives. One option is therefore the use of actors’ categories,
meaning period and local terms, such as poetics for the study of poetry and theater in
ancient Greece, grammar for the Italian humanists’ study of language, and jinshixue
(the study of metal and stone) for tenth-century Chinese antiquarianism.
History of Humanities welcomes contributions that critically engage with the valid-
ity of the term humanities and its related Eurocentric ideologies as predicated on an-
cient philology, Renaissance humanism, and the modern humanities faculties at Ger-
man, French, and English-speaking universities. Yet as universities worldwide have
adopted, at least in general terms, the Western model, our focus on the humanities re-
flects a global state of affairs.8 What is more, we feel that the ambition to write com-
parative historiographies of the humanities is a powerful heuristic that fills a conspic-
uous lacuna in the history of knowledge.
We welcome articles on topics from all regions and all periods, both before and af-
ter the formation of university disciplines and including recently established fields,

7. James Elkins, “Art History as a Global Discipline,” in Is Art History Global?, ed. James Elkins
(London: Routledge, 2007), 3–23.
8. See, e.g., the articles on the modern humanities in South Africa (Keith Breckenridge, 1253–66),
Mexico (Erica Pani, 1327–42), India (Sanjay Seth, 1354–67), and Russia (Oleg Kharkhordin, 1283–98)
in American Historical Review 120, no. 4 (2015).
6 | HISTORY OF HUMANITIES SPRING 2016

such as media studies and digital humanities, as well as discontinued fields, such as an-
tiquarianism. Contributions may highlight the singularity of historical and geographical
practices or emphasize parallels and connections between disciplines, periods, and cul-
tures. We also invite historians of the humanities to engage with the history of science,
and vice versa. Eventually a case could be made for uniting the history of the human-
ities and the history of science under the header of “history of knowledge.”9 Equally,
however, contributors to History of Humanities may choose to highlight the specificity
of the humanities in regard to the sciences.
History of Humanities also encourages contributions on the political and societal
value of the humanities. While actual practices in the humanities and sciences have
been quite different from Dilthey’s dichotomy between understanding and explaining,
his distinction molded the minds of many, and his interpretative approach may have
contributed to the current image problem of the humanities: they are seen as a luxury
pastime with little relevance for society and even less for the economy. Our journal
welcomes arguments in favor of (or, obviously, against) the value of the humanities,
perhaps emphasizing their importance for critical thinking, social responsibility, or
democratic citizenship.10 In this context, our comparative ambitions entail more than
simply redressing an imbalance in our knowledge of the “global humanities.” The un-
derstanding of how one’s own traditions have been different from, and determined by,
outside influences contributes to cultural consciousness. This insight is to be taken to
heart by historians of the humanities; as Edward Said (1935–2003) argued, it is their
disciplines—the study of languages and civilizations—that have molded the Eurocen-
tric worldview.11
In sum, History of Humanities offers a stage to different practices and ideals in the
humanities, from antiquity to the present and from all regions and cultures. Contri-
butions may individuate singular historical actors or draw overarching parallels and
connections; seek out commonalities with the sciences or emphasize the humanities’
special status; and argue for or against their societal value. The journal publishes in-

9. See, e.g., Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013);
John Pickstone, “Toward a History of Western Knowledges: Sketching Together the Histories of the
Humanities and the Natural Sciences,” in Bod, Maat, and Weststeijn, Making of the Humanities,
3:667–85; Rens Bod and Julia Kursell, “Focus: The History of Humanities and the History of Science,”
Isis 106, no. 2 (2015).
10. See Jörg-Dieter Gauger and Günther Rüther, eds., Warum die Geisteswissenschaften Zukunft
haben! (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2007); Jonathan Bate, ed., The Public Value of the Humanities
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010); Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the
Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Helen Small, The Value of the Human-
ities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
11. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).
 INTRODUCTION | 7

dividual research articles, book reviews, and conference reports, with a special Forum
section presenting a set of articles devoted to a specific theme.
In the present volume, the first such Forum section explores the contemporary rel-
evance of the dichotomy “monument and document” as formulated by Erwin Panof-
sky (by John Guillory, with commentaries by John Joseph and Geoffrey Harpham).
This is followed by five articles that range from historical overviews to specific case
studies. The first analyzes the status of the Chinese tradition of historical writing in
the light of recent Western influences, concluding with a programmatic plea for the
survival of Chinese scholarly virtues (by Liu Dong, with an introduction by Haun
Saussy). The role of mythology in the Northern European humanities of the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries is analyzed from historical and methodological per-
spectives (by Joep Leerssen). Ferdinand Gregorovius provides a case in point of the
importance of legends in historical scholarship (by Maya Maskarinec). The next con-
tribution is a “bio-bibliographical” sketch of the Russian scholar Semen Vengerov, who
spent his life compiling such sketches (by Mark Gamsa). Finally, one of the main chal-
lenges described above—the relationship between the humanities, human sciences, and
natural sciences—is addressed (by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger).

WORKS CITED
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Bod, Rens. 2013. A New History of the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bod, Rens, and Julia Kursell. 2015. “Focus: The History of Humanities and the History of
Science.” Isis 106, no. 2.
Bod, Rens, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, eds. 2010–14. The Making of the Humanities.
3 vols. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1883. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung
für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
Dirlik, Arif, ed. 2011. “The National Learning Revival.” Special issue of China Perspectives 1.
Elkins, James. 2007. “Art History as a Global Discipline.” In Is Art History Global?, edited
by James Elkins, 3–23. London: Routledge.
Gauger, Jörg-Dieter, and Günther Rüther, eds. 2007. Warum die Geisteswissenschaften
Zukunft haben! Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder.
Hsiung, Ping-chen. 2015. “The Evolution of Chinese Humanities.” American Historical Re-
view 120 (4): 1267–82.
Johansson, Perry. 2014. “Cross-Cultural Epistemology: How European Sinology Became
the Bridge to China’s Modern Humanities.” In The Modern Humanities, vol. 3 of The
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Kristeller, Paul Oskar. 1944–45. “Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance.”
Byzantion 17:346–74.
8 | HISTORY OF HUMANITIES SPRING 2016

Makdisi, George. 1990. The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West:
With Special Reference to Scholasticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Nussbaum, Martha. 2010. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pickstone, John. 2014. “Toward a History of Western Knowledges: Sketching Together the
Histories of the Humanities and the Natural Sciences.” In The Modern Humanities, vol.
3 of The Making of the Humanities, edited by Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn,
267–85. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Said, Edward. 2004. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Small, Helen. 2013. The Value of the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.