Comparative philology was one of the most prolific fields of knowledge in the humanities during the 19th century. Based on the discovery of the Indo-European language family, it seemed to admit the reconstruction of a common history of European languages, and even mythologies, literatures, and people. However, it also represented a way to establish geographies of belonging and difference in the context of 19th century nation-building and identity politics. In spite of a widely acknowledged consensus about the principles and methods of comparative philology, the results depended on local conditions and practices. If Scandinavians were considered to be Germanic or not, for example, was up to identity politics that differed in Berlin, Strasbourg, Copenhagen and Paris. The contributors here elaborate these dynamics through analyses of the changing and conflicting versions of imaginative geographies that the actors of comparative philology evoked by using Scandinavian literatures and cultures. They also show how these seemingly delocalized scientific models depended on ever-different local needs and practices. Through this, the book represents the first distinctly transnational dynamic geography and history of the philological knowledge of the North – not only as a history of a scientific discourse, but also as a result of doing and performing scientific work.

Geographies of Philological Knowledge examines the relationship between medievalism and colonialism in the nineteenth-century Hispanic American context through the striking case of the Creole Andrés Bello (1781–1865), a Venezuelan grammarian, editor, legal scholar, and politician, and his lifelong philological work on the medieval heroic narrative that would later become Spain’s national epic, the Poem of the Cid. Nadia R. Altschul combs Bello’s study of the poem and finds throughout it evidence of a “coloniality of knowledge.” Altschul reveals how, during the nineteenth century, the framework for philological scholarship established in and for core European nations—France, England, and especially Germany—was exported to Spain and Hispanic America as the proper way of doing medieval studies. She argues that the global designs of European philological scholarship are conspicuous in the domain of disciplinary historiography, especially when examining the local history of a Creole Hispanic American like Bello, who is neither fully European nor fully alien to European culture. Altschul likewise highlights Hispanic America’s intellectual internalization of coloniality and its understanding of itself as an extension of Europe. A timely example of interdisciplinary history, interconnected history, and transnational study, Geographies of Philological Knowledge breaks with previous nationalist and colonialist histories and thus forges a new path for the future of medieval studies.

This book retraces the formation of modern English Studies by departing from philological scholarship along two lines: in terms of institutional histories and in terms of the separation of literary criticism and linguistics.

Bestsellers and masterpieces: The changing medieval canon addresses the strange fact that, in both European and Middle Eastern medieval studies, those texts that we now study and teach as the most canonical representations of their era were in fact not popular or even widely read in their day. On the other hand, those texts that were popular, as evidenced by the extant manuscript record, are taught and studied with far less frequency. The book provides cross-cultural insight into both the literary tastes of the medieval period and the literary and political forces behind the creation of the ‘modern canon’ of medieval literature.

Like England's Arthur and France's Charlemagne, the Cid is Spain's national hero, and for centuries he has served as an ideal model of citizenship. All Spaniards are familiar with the story of the Cid and the multifarious ways in which he is visualized. From illuminations in medieval manuscripts to illustrations in twenty-first-century editions, depictions of the Cid vary widely, revealing just how much Spain's national identity has transformed throughout the centuries. Uncovering the racial, gendered, and political impacts of one of Spain's most legendary heroes, Illustrating El Cid, 1498 to Today traces the development of more than five centuries of illustrations and problematizes their reception and circulation in Spain and abroad. By documenting the evolution of visual representations of the Cid, their artists, and their targeted readerships, Lauren Beck also uncovers how his legend became a national projection of Spanish identity, one that was shaped by foreign hands and even manipulated into propaganda by the country's most recent dictator, Francisco Franco. Through detailed analysis, Beck unsettles the presumption that chivalric masculinity dominated the Cid's visualization, and points to how women were represented with increasing modesty as readerships became younger in modern times. An unprecedented exploration of Spanish visual history, Illustrating El Cid, 1498 to Today yields thought-provoking insights about the powerful ways in which illustration shapes representations of gender, identity, and ethnicity.

A postcolonial study of the conceptualization of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America as medieval and oriental If Spain and Portugal were perceived as backward in the nineteenth century—still tainted, in the minds of European writers and thinkers, by more than a whiff of the medieval and Moorish—Ibero-America lagged even further behind. Originally colonized in the late fifteenth century, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil were characterized by European travelers and South American elites alike as both feudal and oriental, as if they retained an oriental-Moorish character due to the centuries-long presence of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula. So, Nadia R. Altschul observes, the Scottish metropolitan writer Maria Graham (1785-1842) depicted the Chile in which she found herself stranded after the death of her sea captain husband as a premodern, precapitalist, and orientalized place that could only benefit from the free trade imperialism of the British. Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811-1888), the most influential Latin American writer and statesman of his day, conceived of his own Euro-American creole class as medieval in such works as Civilization and Barbarism: The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga (1845) and Recollections of a Provincial Past (1850), and wrote of the inherited Moorish character of Spanish America in his 1883 Conflict and Harmony of the Races in America. Moving forward into the first half of the twentieth century, Altschul explores the oriental character that Gilberto Freyre assigned to Portuguese colonization in his The Masters and the Slaves (1933), in which he postulated the "Mozarabic" essence of Brazil. In Politics of Temporalization, Altschul examines the case of South America to ask more broadly what is at stake—what is harmed, what is excused—when the present is temporalized, when elements of "the now" are characterized as belonging to, and consequently imposed upon, a constructed and othered "past."