University of Virginia Library

The history of scholarship has long been a recognized subject of inquiry in certain disciplines. One thinks immediately of J. E. Sandys's A History of Classical Scholarship (1903-8), Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's Geschichte der Philologie (1921), and Rudolf Pfeiffer's History of Classical Scholarship (1968-76) and of the considerable body of other work in this area.[1] Scholarship is of course a cultural activity, and the historical study of it forms a natural part of the intellectual history of any period or country. In practice, however, it is sometimes neglected in such histories, perhaps out of a feeling that it is derivative, not primary. But a distinction between creative work and scholarship cannot be maintained, for every effort to establish past events—however disciplined by what are taken to be responsible ways of handling evidence—is a creative act, involving judgments at each step. The same observation applies to the attempt at distinguishing criticism from creative work (and from scholarship). Literary critics (who are not necessarily concerned with history) have occasionally argued that their own writings are on a par with the literature they are ostensibly discussing. Surely, however, the worth of a piece depends on individual performance, not genre: some scholarly or critical essays are indeed more valuable and inspiring than some poems. All verbal works are instances of human creativity, and any of them can reveal how individuals in the past have viewed their own world and their inheritance. I need not belabor the point: the history of scholarship is a significant branch of historical study.

Some scholarly fields have had longer histories than others, and it is natural that the younger fields are less likely than the older ones to have been the subject of extensive historical investigation. American literature, for example, did not become an accepted field of academic study until well into the twentieth century, and the history of the field has not yet been vigorously pursued.[2] An encouraging sign, however, was the establishment in 1976 of the Jay B. Hubbell Center for American Literary Historiography at Duke University, which now holds the papers of

a number of prominent scholars of American literature as well as the archives of relevant organizations (such as the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association of America).[3] It is to be hoped that this development will serve as a stimulus to the creation of similar centers in other fields. Bibliography is a field deserving of more historical study than it has received, and a gathering of appropriate materials would no doubt encourage further work. Although the listing of books is an ancient activity, the examination of the physical evidence in books was rarely undertaken until relatively recent times. Bradshaw's work in the third quarter of the nineteenth century has rightly caused him to be regarded as the father of modern analytical bibliography, and the writings of Pollard, McKerrow, and Greg, beginning about the turn of the century, established the importance of bibliographical evidence for the editing of post-medieval literature. The emergence of analytical and descriptive bibliography as recognizable fields is therefore essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon. What this kind of bibliography has achieved is even now frequently misunderstood; but it has such far-reaching consequences for all who read that its story ought to be considered an important chapter in intellectual history. I should like to offer here some reflections on bibliographical history as a field and some indication of what material is available to build on.