Issued in January, April, July, and October. Subscription price, $2.00 a year; single copies, 60 cents postpaid. All communications are to be addressed to CHARLES BUNDY WILSON, Germanic Languages and Literatures BERTHOLD L. ULLMAN, Classical Languages and Literatures (Concluded on third page of cover) PHILOLOGICAL QUARTERLY VOLUME I APRIL, 1922 NUMBER 2 SOME PROBLEMS OF SCHOLARSHIP IN THE University of Iowa It is the desire of various scholars in the modern language field that their activities should be co-ordinated and possibly concentrated on certain definite and desirable objectives, so that through a term of years the knowledge and value of modern languages and literatures may be extended and increased. Whether or not such a thing is done will depend on the desires of scholars, on their willingness to co-operate unselfishly, and, possibly to a still greater extent, on the conditions imposed upon them by the circumstances in which they are placed. They are almost all teachers, swayed, if not dominated, by the demands of the American educational system. They are, moreover, scholars in fields in which primary source materials are far away, dependent on libraries of varying but usually inadequate content, and with facilities for publication largely either local or commercialized. It is my purpose in this paper to make a survey of renaissance scholarship from a somewhat ideal point of view; but whatever action is taken in the direction of co-operative scholarship should be closely scanned from the point of view of our limitations, and subjects chosen which many scholars may be competent to undertake, and may find reasonably within the compass of their library facilities. 1 Read before the Central Division of the Modern Language Association of America, December 29, 1921. Owing to limitations of space, it has been impossible to include suggested outlines of the subjects presented. The bibliographical notes have also been very greatly reduced. It must, however, be frankly confessed, at the outset, that, in my own opinion, co-operation on the part of many scholars is not more needed than perseverance on the part of individual scholars. It is often said that American modern language scholarship is made up mainly of scattered monographs, and that though it is intelligent, sincere and highly scientific in method, it is relatively less important than it would be if it were done in larger blocks. A remedy for this would be at hand if the individual scholar stuck to his task long enough to cover larger phases of it. Publication in learned journals of various chapters of a longer work and of incidental discoveries made during the pursuit of it, is highly commendable and highly inspiring to other scholars. The thing desired is that, after the consideration of minor parts, the whole book should, if possible, finally appear. It is worth while in the first place to call to mind various cooperative enterprises in the field of scholarship. The system most commonly used, when a subject is undertaken, is first to divide it into parts, and, secondly, to select from the group of recognized scholars those thought best equipped by the nature of their specialization and by their talents to undertake the various particular units of the whole. This method has long been in use, particularly by encyclopædia makers. The Dictionary of National Biography stands out as one of its noted achievements. Traill's Social England was an early application of the method to historical and literary subjects. The Cambridge Modern History, the Cambridge History of English Literature, and Shakespeare's England are more recent examples. Differing slightly from these are the English Men of Letters and the American Men of Letters and other series of biographies. In The American Nation: A History, each participant writes a full volume instead of a chapter or section. Of course, in this connection, one recalls, as among the most important of all co-operative efforts, Müller's Handbuch, Paul's Grundriss, Gröber's Grundriss, and the Histoire littéraire de la France. Another type of co-operation in which a great deal remains to be done is in the publication of texts. We need not enumerate the various English societies, and the various French, German, Spanish and Italian series. Still other examples of co-operation are to be found in various co-operative editions. Shakespeare has 7 been edited over and over again by this method and is being edited at this time by the English scholars of an American university, where also for a term of years English students have been editing the plays of Ben Jonson. An immediate example of co-operation is found in the plans of the National Research Council, in which various sections are devoting themselves to certain large objectives. The geological section, for example, is devoting itself to Sedimentation, for it seems that sedimentary rocks have been somewhat neglected as compared with igneous and metamorphic rocks and were, therefore, a fit subject for study. Co-operation of an informal character has perhaps been the rule even in the English field in America. One recalls the work at one university on Chaucer and his contemporaries, and that at another on the early drama. All told then, I think it will be granted that co-operation is desirable. The task, therefore, would seem to be, first, to ascertain what needs to be done on the present basis of modern language scholarship; and, secondly, to attempt to determine one or more new points of view from adherence to which new light may be thrown upon old matters and new truths discovered. I find myself under the necessity of speaking mainly of the field of English literature, and I hope that scholars in ancient and other modern languages will piece out my imperfections by criticizing, applying, and supplementing what I have to say, from their knowledge of their own fields and of my field. British scholarship of the Renaissance has been excellent from an antiquarian point of view. English literature has been well illustrated. This is true of scholarship from the time of Sir Egerton Brydges and Malone to Shakespeare's England. It has also been excellent in biography and history, although, possibly, no genuine study of literature from a historical standpoint has ever been made. Literary students in all countries have of recent years showed an increasing preoccupation with literary form. Prosody has been studied historically and, to a certain extent, psychologically; likewise the forms of prose discourse. Recent study has covered the romance, the ballad, the pastoral, the lyric, the exemplum, the dialogue, the rogue story, the essay, the emblem, comedy, tragedy, and many other forms. The history of criticism has had its share of attention, and many Renaissance critical writ |