Philology as an Art of Reading? Disciplinary Framework and Scholarly Practice

Abstract This article explores the tensions that structure philological reading practices by tracing a specific moment of their historical evolution and their material foundations. Starting with Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception of philology as an “art of slow reading”, the study investigates how this intellectual posture implies not only a hermeneutic attitude but also a concrete engagement with material supports. It situates this perspective within the broader methodological framework of the Altertumswissenschaft , the science of Antiquity developed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany, which prioritized textual reconstruction over manuscript transmission. The article then contrasts this normative paradigm with the case of Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison, an eighteenth-century French philologist whose meticulous work on the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad exemplifies an alternative model of philological attention, grounded in the material observation of palaeographic details, and of graphic legibility. Through this comparison, the article reveals two coexisting yet often conflicting regimes of scholarly practice: one that seeks to transcend the materiality of the text in pursuit of a purified original, and another that engages directly with the physicality of transmission. By reframing philology as a historically situated art of reading that encompasses both intellectual and manual dimensions, the article invites a renewed attention to the material conditions that shape access to ancient texts, and proposes to overcome the disciplinary habit of reading “despite” manuscripts.