Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe by Alexander Marr et al. (review)

Abstract

Logodaedalus is an enlightening and often surprising historical and cultural lexicography of ingenuity and genius in early modern Europe. The express intent of the four authors is to provide an “antiteleological” prehistory of the Romantic concept of “genius” by following the uneven and unpredictable— contradictory even—development of meanings and functions of terms such as ingenuity, genius, wit, ingenio, ésprit, ingegno, Sinn, and the like. By focusing on the “particularity,” “peculiarity,” and “dynamism” of language and practices related to and emanating from the Latin ingenium, Marr, Garrod, Marcaida and Oosterhoff demonstrate the creative power of a philological method that maps the historical situatedness and complexity of etymological, artistic-literary, and philosophical instantiations of the terms in question: “It is a kind of philology that seeks to show how significant words produced meaning in history and as history” (2). At the same time, the lexicographical framework successfully challenges statistically driven, “big data” conclusions through its intraand intercultural analyses of distinct iterations in a wide array of texts. In fact, the entire enterprise could itself be called ingenious, since dividing the lexical terrain between “keywords” that display a “family resemblance” and other verba that are merely “neighbors” requires judgment rather than brute numbers, which places the scholarship of the authors inside the realm of ingenuity (5). One of the central plot lines of Logodaedalus is that the Romantic understanding of genius can be traced back to the lexicography of ingenium rather than genius. The cultural-semantic field of ingenuity moves around and through a changeable group of specific characteristics that normally includes “natural inclination, creative potential, craft talent, or mental agility” (5) and organizes itself around “four axes of meaning: moral, cognitive, presentational, and artificial” (7). When different characteristics are considered in light of these B O O K R E V I E W S