The Highest Virtue of the Philologist; or, How to Do Things with Virtues and Vices

Scholarly virtues and vices are a well-established research topic in the history of the humanities. Drawing on a rich array of sources in which scholars invoked concepts of virtue and vice to express their standards of good scholarship, historians try to map how epistemic virtues and academic performance criteria evolved over time. A complicating factor, however, is that virtues and vices were often also used for other purposes. In scholarly controversies, for instance, virtues and vices sometimes served primarily as rhetorical weapons used to discredit opponents. This prompts two questions: Should historians attend to the full range of scholars’ virtue talk? And, if so, what would be an appropriate way of studying this language? Answering the first question in the affirmative, this article proposes a rhetorical approach that helps historians grasp not only the referential aspects of scholars’ language but also its performative dimensions (things that scholars did with words).