Rigour and Creativity

Abstract

This paper explores some of the phases of intellectual history discussed in Constanze Güthenke’s book Feeling and Classical Philology (Cambridge, 2020): the links between early nineteenth century liberalism and the scoping of ancient history as a field of scholarly investigation; the formative moment in which the classical world began to lose its paradigmatic role; the connections between this new approach and the establishment of a developing bourgeois culture; the crisis of historicism; and the interdisciplinary paradigm that Wilamowitz sought to assert.