A Science of Letters? Forms of “Normal Science” in the Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Humanities

Abstract

Was there anything like “normal science” in the early modern humanities? The term humanities itself, though going back to early humanist studia humanitatis, is problematic to use for early modern scholarship, since it mainly indicated a (propaedeutic) curriculum. What we now call the humanities were known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as “letters.” Different, overlapping container notions were also in use: rhetoric and belles-lettres, schöne Wissenschaften, critique, erudition. Early modern scholarship was organized by genre rather than by discipline, but the genres themselves were unstable. To what extent, then, can one identify examples that represent normal scholarly practice, standards for what counted as “knowledge,” common ways of “puzzle-solving”? This article consecutively explores four aspects: (1) textbooks that identified the object of knowledge, (2) the normative example of early modern philology, (3) practices of “puzzle-solving” in antiquarianism, and (4) perceived discrepancies in historical scholarship between the classical example and the practice of compilation.