The Visionary Philologist: F.A. Wolf in His Self-Staging and Reception

Abstract

This paper examines how the German classical scholar Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), celebrated as a founder of modern philology since the early nineteenth century, staged himself as a visionary innovator and successfully shaped later narratives about himself. First, it discusses how Wolf defined the good philologist foremost as a rigorous and daring textual critic. Second, it analyses how he fashioned his own scholarly persona accordingly and thereby positioned himself within a tradition beginning with the Cambridge don Richard Bentley (1662–1742). It argues that Wolf presented himself to his mostly German readers as an heir to the English philological tradition, bypassing more immediate German predecessors, especially his former teacher Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) with whom he had broken publicly in the 1790s. Finally, the paper contends that the scholarly genealogy Wolf fashioned for himself took hold in nineteenth-century histories of classical philology, becoming part of how the discipline’s past was narrated by later generations of scholars.

Bio

Laura Loporcaro is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, part of the ERC project PhiSci: Philology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Trained in history and classical languages at the Free University of Berlin (BA, MA) and the University of Oxford (DPhil), she is currently writing a critical biography of Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), a founding figure of modern classical philology. It starts from the question how certain aspects of Wolf’s life and work became canonical in disciplinary memory while others were forgotten, and why. Her first book, Reading Quintilian: Didactic Authority in the Institutio oratoria, appeared in 2025 with Oxford University Press.