SOURCE: “The Splitting of Humanism: Bentley, Swift and the English Battle of the Books,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 49, No. 3, July-September 1988, pp. 453-72.

[In the following essay, Tinkler discusses the roles of Richard Bentley and Jonathan Swift in the Battle of the Books, arguing that their dispute is best understood in the context of the “splitting of humanist scholarship and humanist literature into separate literary genres” rather than in “the context of the commonplace debate between ancients and moderns.”]

It was argued some years ago that the English “Battle of the Books” of the late seventeenth century was just another phase in a long Renaissance humanist querelle des anciens et des modernes.¹ The English Battle was thus another, and essentially repetitive, reworking of a theme that had become a commonplace. More recently, however, Joseph M. Levine has argued that an essential ingredient in the English Battle was “the bitter contest that resulted between the ‘wits’ and the scholars, rhetoric and philology, ‘polite’ learning and erudition. … It was, therefore, the argument between literature and learning that alone could be said to be new.”² Levine's essay completely reorients the terms of the English Battle and locates it in a potentially more revealing and significant humanist controversy. Anthony Grafton has argued of the Renaissance that there were two tendencies in humanism: “One set of humanists seeks to make the ancient world live again, assuming its undimmed relevance and unproblematic accessibility; another set seeks to put the ancient world back into its own time, admitting that its reconstruction is a difficult enterprise and that success may reveal the irrelevance of ancient experience and precept to modern problems.”³ In this context Bentley belongs to the latter strand in humanism, while Swift belongs to the former. What is thus striking about their debate is the extent to which they fail to engage each other—the extent to which Bentley ignores the literary debate between ancients and moderns, and the extent to which Swift ridicules and rejects Bentley's scholarly enterprise. Swift, the man of letters, and Bentley, the scholar, belong to different discourses.

The union of literature and learning had been a humanist ideal throughout the Renaissance: the English Battle seems to partake of a historic dissolution of this union. In relation to the Italian seventeenth century, Eric Cochrane has argued that “Baroque historiography split history as literature and history as research—which had been united in practice if not always in theory throughout the Renaissance—into two separate genres of historical writing.”⁴ The argument of the present paper is that Bentley's and Swift's contributions to the English Battle of the Books are more comprehensible in the context of this splitting of humanist scholarship and humanist literature into separate literary genres than in the context of the commonplace debate between ancients and moderns.

Rhetoric is currently understood to be one of the keys to understanding humanism.⁵ Though Levine describes the English Battle in terms of a debate between rhetoric and philology, I shall argue that Bentley, like his Renaissance humanist precursors, derived his philological approach from rhetorical strategies of proof no less than Swift. The difference is that Swift and Bentley employed different rhetorical genera in a way that made the two sides of the debate incommensurable: each elaborated different, ultimately incompatible aspects of the humanists' rhetorical affiliation. My argument thus seeks to contribute to a reinterpretation of humanism that is less concerned with classicism (an affiliation to the ancients) than with the argument advanced by George M. Logan that “the development of humanism is to a considerable extent a dialectical exploration of tensions.”⁶

My paper is divided into four sections. In the first I shall describe in more detail the two “sets” or tendencies within Renaissance humanism that are identified by Grafton. In the second I shall show that Bentley's scholarship was incommensurable with the other humanist literature of the debate because each was modelled on a fundamentally different rhetorical genus. I shall not be concerned with the rhetorical category of style (elocutio) but with the rhetorical strategies of argument and the differentiation among genera that relate to rhetorical invention (inventio). In the third section I shall briefly consider Swift's and Bentley's careers for one explanation of why the two writers, who could both be considered successors to the humanists, went different ways. In the fourth section I shall argue that the debate between Swift and Bentley was not between moderns and ancients, but between two different approaches to texts—that of the professional scholar and that of the occasional man of letters. I shall conclude by arguing for the appropriateness of Swift's phrase “Battle of the Books” to describe the English debate, which was ultimately about texts and their status rather than about ancient and modern literature.

I

Sir William Temple, an elder statesman in his sixties, initiated the Battle in 1690 with his essay Of Ancient and Modern Learning, which praised ancient learning at the expense of modern and particularly commended the Epistles of Phalaris and Aesop's Fables as among the oldest and best literature. In 1694 the brilliant young William Wotton, not yet thirty, responded with his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, which defended the modern arts and sciences. At the beginning of 1695 a new edition of the Epistles of Phalaris appeared, undoubtedly in the wake of Temple's commendatory review, under the name of the Hon. Charles Boyle, a young undergraduate, though it was probably prepared as much by his academic seniors as by himself. The edition contained an accusation that Bentley, newly installed Keeper of the King's Libraries, had put difficulties in the way of making a necessary text of the Epistles available for collation.

Bentley, then in his mid-thirties, entered the Battle with his Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles, Socrates, Euripides and the Fables of Aesop, appended to the second edition of Wotton's Reflections in 1697 and demonstrating that the works in question were spurious. It appears to have been at this stage that Swift, then about thirty, wrote his Full and True Account of the Battel Fought last Friday, Between the Antient and the Modern Books in St. James's Library—a title that focussed attention specifically on Bentley rather than Wotton—though it did not appear in print until 1704, after Temple's death. Meanwhile, in 1698, a vicious collaborative response to Bentley appeared under Boyle's name, Dr. Bentley's Dissertations … Examin'd; and Bentley responded in 1699 with a vastly expanded and monumentally erudite Dissertation, focussed entirely on the Epistles of Phalaris.⁷

The role of Bentley's Dissertation in the Battle was to destroy the basis for Temple's argument that “the oldest books we have are still in their kind the best” by demonstrating that the Epistles and Fables, claimed by Temple as “the two most ancient that I know of in prose,” were spurious forgeries (quoted Bentley, II, 133). Bentley's contribution to the Battle, then, was to reduce Temple's argument to absurdity by demonstrating that the writings which Temple praised as oldest and best were not in fact the oldest.

The detection of forgeries had been a characteristic enterprise of Renaissance humanists since Petrarch in the fourteenth century. In a letter to the Emperor Charles IV of 1355, Petrarch demonstrated that a document known as the Austrian Exemption, which was purported to have been granted by Julius Caesar, could not have been written either by him or in his time. Petrarch's letter has been claimed by Peter Burke as an early monument of the Renaissance “sense of the past.”⁸ It was in turn a precursor to Lorenzo Valla's celebrated exposure of the Donation of Constantine in the fifteenth century, a work that has been claimed by Donald R. Kelley as one of the foundations of modern critical method.⁹

For various reasons the detection of forgeries appears characteristic of the humanists. First, such detection requires the kind of extensive reading of ancient texts and the auctores that is typical of the humanists. Second, one of the humanists' defining characteristics was their concern to read complete texts, rather than excerpts in florilegia, and to read them as far as possible in the state in which they had been written. The humanists thus launched a massive project of collecting, editing, and emending ancient texts, to which Bentley, as a classical scholar, was a direct successor.

Nevertheless, the detection of forgeries had been practised before the Renaissance. Kelley observes that the rules and techniques for detecting forgeries had been developed by medieval canon lawyers, especially in the twelfth century.¹⁰ Before the Middle Ages, ancient rhetorical textbooks gave directions about the detection of forged documents that must have been part of the stock-in-trade of ancient lawyers.¹¹ The walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb reveal, according to Jack Goody, that a legal case was won “on the grounds that not only were … title-deeds forged but there had been falsification of the land register at the time of the former trial.”¹²

The detection of forgeries, then, has been a recurrently important judicial strategy. It is therefore significant that Petrarch's exposure of the Austrain Exemption also takes place in a judicial context. Though Petrarch leaves questions of law to Charles's iurisconsulti, his advice has obviously been sought in a judicial context, and he uses a judicial technique that we have seen to have been familiar to both ancient and medieval lawyers. Discussing the issue of a disputed document, Cicero recommended the argument that “it is inconsistent with the rest of the writings either of other persons or most preferably, if it be possible to say so, of the same person.”¹³ This may have been one of the sources for Petrarch's method, for he compares the Exemption with other writings of Caesar that were known to be authentic, as well as with the writings of other ancient authors, and demonstrates on substantive and stylistic grounds that Caesar could not have been the author.

Valla's exposure of the Donation is much more elaborate than Petrarch's letter, but it too is judicial. As Vincenzo de Caprio has shown, it follows the model of a full judicial oration.¹⁴ Like Petrarch, Valla is concerned with authorship: he does not locate the true author of the text nor date its composition, but he does convincingly demonstrate that it could not have been written by Constantine nor in his time.

Two points are of importance. First, the detection of forgeries was a distinctively legal technique. It is no accident that the critical historiography that was developed at the end of the Renaissance was developed by “legal humanists” and relied, according to George Huppert, on “the jurists' approach to the detection of facts.”¹⁵ François Baudouin provided a theory for authenticating historical facts and documents on the basis of courtroom practice.¹⁶ Accordingly, a judicial language and judicial concepts pervaded the method of textual criticism, and these essentially legal terms persist today in the language of “evidence,” “witnesses,” and “testimony” that is also to be found in the critical scholarship of the Renaissance.

Second, critical method was centered especially in the question of authorship. Both the ancient rhetors and the Renaissance humanists focus on the issue whether the purported author of a text was the true author. This question gave scholars a particular purchase on their enquiries. They could compare a text with other authenticated writings of the author or with information about the author contained in the writings of others.

The focus of critics on the identity of the author returns us to the humanist quality of critical scholarship. It is a truism of modern scholarship that the identity of the authors of texts was of relatively little importance in the Middle Ages. According to R. Howard Bloch, “few texts are ascribable to an author invested with more personality than a mere name.”¹⁷ By contrast Petrarch gave immense importance to authorship both as a reader and as a writer. As a reader, he insisted in a well-known passage that “philosophers must not be judged from isolated words but from their uninterrupted coherence and consistency. … He who wants to be safe in praising the entire man must see, examine, and estimate the entire man.”¹⁸ As a writer, he was especially concerned to present his own personality so that, as Kristeller observes, Petrarch “talks about a variety of things and ideas but essentially he always talks about himself.”¹⁹

Nevertheless, the critical method of the humanists was in potentially uneasy alliance with the very interest in authors that encouraged it. When Petrarch sought to understand Cicero the man as author, he did so in order to converse with him. His familiar letters to ancient authors are one manifestation of a convivial attitude that led him to remark of Cicero and Vergil that “my admiration for and intimacy with their genius achieved through lengthy study led me to such love that you would think this kind of affection scarcely possible toward living men.”²⁰

The idea of a conversation with the men of the ancient world persisted to the time of Machiavelli and on to that of Montaigne, who remarked that “in this association with men I mean to include, and foremost, those who live only in the memory of books,” and who, like Petrarch, had “a singular curiosity … to know the soul and the natural judgements of my authors.”²¹ When Petrarch could say that “if Cicero was a man, it follows that in some things, I do not say in many things, he will have erred” (si homo fuit Cicero, consequens esse ut in quibusdam, ne dicam multis, erraverit), he was able to regard Cicero not as a kind of disembodied, text-bound authority (auctoritas) but as a fallible homo just like himself—a mere mortal with whom he could hope to converse as an equal, and whom he could thus also hope to imitate as an equal.²² The humanistic approach to texts made their authors more human, more approachable, more familiar. By contrast the method of humanist textual criticism eventually questioned this familiarity. As Mark Hulliung observes, “following every victory of the humanists in restoring a classical text to its context, there was that much additional evidence of the absence of a common denominator between ancient and modern ways of life.”²³ Humanism as a movement appears to hover between the two poles of a wholesale identification with antiquity and a critical distance from it.²⁴

In the Renaissance the humanistic ideal remained that of a union of learning and eloquence. It was in the seventeenth century, according to Barbara J. Shapiro, that “English historical thought first reached its modern state of methodological ambivalence, poised between the competing claims of literature and science.”²⁵ But the two “sets” of humanists identified by Grafton were potentially at odds. Grafton observes of the “tensions and contradictions” in humanism that “if we treat humanist readers as practitioners of a form of rhetoric, some difficulties vanish,” since “most humanists interpreted—like good rhetoricians—for a specific purpose and a particular audience.”²⁶ The different kinds or genera of rhetoric had since Aristotle been associated with different audiences and purposes. It is significant that the method of textual criticism was typically judicial because in other respects humanistic literature does not appear to have been of the judicial genus.²⁷

There were three recognized genera or kinds of rhetoric: the judicial, the deliberative (political and moral), and the demonstrative or epideictic (the ceremonial art of praise and blame). Kristeller observes that “unlike ancient rhetoric, Renaissance rhetoric was not primarily concerned with the political and even less with the judiciary speech.”²⁸ John M. McManamon argues that from the beginning of the fifteenth century “epideictic continued to enjoy pre-eminence among the genera causarum throughout the Italian Renaissance.”²⁹ The importance of the demonstrative genus for the humanists was not restricted to oratory proper. The prominent humanist enterprise of history-writing, for instance, was basically demonstrative in kind—even though elements of the other genera might appear in humanist histories.³⁰ Demonstrative history was concerned with praise and blame and with providing useful moral lessons to the reader or hearer. Thus, as Felix Gilbert observes, “not factual completeness and accuracy, but moral guidance was expected from the true historian.”³¹

By contrast a judicial attitude toward the past had quite different aims, emphases and strategies. Aristotle observed that “to each of these [genera] a special time is appropriate: to the deliberative the future; … to the forensic the past, for it is always in reference to things done; … to the epideictic most appropriately the present. … It is not uncommon, however, for epideictic speakers to avail themselves of the past by way of recalling it.”³² The judicial approach to history was concerned with the past alone, and the more reliance it placed on inartificial evidence, “such as witnesses, tortures, contracts, and the like,” the more it was concerned with precisely that factual accuracy that was of relatively little importance to the demonstrative historian.³³ In brief the judicial and demonstrative approaches to history were divergent and, if pushed to extremes, incommensurable.

Demonstrative history, as Quintilian observed, “has a certain affinity to poetry and may be regarded as a kind of prose poem.”³⁴ Sir Philip Sidney argued that “the best of the historian is subject to the poet.”³⁵ But in a judicial context the inventio of the demonstrative historian or the fictions of the poet create distortions. With the peculiar emphasis on the authenticity and authority of the written record that developed in European society from the twelfth century, the forgery was a particularly unacceptable fiction, even when documents were forged in order to lend written legitimacy to what had earlier been oral traditions.³⁶ Both forgery and the detection of forgery were brought into being by a judicial emphasis on documentary evidence.³⁷ But in this context there is also a sense in which the demonstrative historian “forged” the past, a practice particularly evident in the rhetorical historian's convention of inventing the speeches purportedly delivered by historical figures. The judicial critic had a commitment to expose such forgeries and to rely only on written records that could be authenticated. The judicial and critical approach to the past, then, always had the potential to invalidate the more inventive and imaginative demonstrative approach, especially in institutional or legalistic contexts that place a high value on verifiability and documentary authenticity.

II

The foregoing discussion of rhetorical genera provides a necessary background for understanding the tensions involved in the English Battle of the Books. Because Bentley has an important place in the development of modern philology, modern commentators tend to ignore the rhetorical manner and approach of his Dissertation and Phalaris.³⁸ Yet both works were not only written in the context of controversy, they were also designed in their context to cause the maximum of embarrassment.³⁹ It is significant that the Dissertation has precisely the judicial character that we have seen to have been associated with critical scholarship. Bentley himself makes his judicial approach quite explicit. Alluding to Temple's acknowledgment that earlier scholars have questioned the authenticity of Phalaris's Epistles (guessing their author to be Lucian), Bentley begins by declaring that “I shall not go to dispossess him [i.e., Phalaris], as those have done before me, by an arbitrary sentence in his own tyranical way; but proceed with him upon lawful evidence, and a fair, impartial trial” (II, 139-40). As Bentley proceeds to make clear, his method is to adduce other writings that are “preserved to be a witness against him,” as well as to examine anachronisms and inconsistencies in the text itself which he calls “confessions” (II, 141; 149). In brief Bentley's entire approach is quite explicitly conceived as a judicial examination of witnesses and comparison of testimony.

Bentley's forensic allusions are no mere ornamental flourish: rhetorical strategies of judicial proof led textual critics to ask what we can recognize as sound scholarly questions. They led Valla to treat the Donation not as a received text the terms of which should be debated but as an historical event that could be questioned according to the interrogative topoi used to examine a criminal accusation. Similarly, they led Baudouin to distinguish between the reliability of original and of secondary documents.⁴⁰ There is more scholarly validity in rhetorical argumentation and more argumentative rhetoric in scholarship than many positivist historians care to admit.⁴¹

Like Petrarch and Valla, Bentley bases his examination on the issue of authorship, demonstrating that the Epistles could not consistently have been written either by Phalaris or in his time. His method of procedure is exemplified in his response, in the Preface of his Phalaris, to an accusation in Boyle's Examination, “That Dr. B[entley] cannot be the Author of the Dissertation” (quoted Bentley, I, lxx). Alluding to the fact that Boyle was not the main author, Bentley replies that “if another should answer him in his own way, and pretend to prove, that Mr. B[oyle] cannot be the Author of the Examination from the variety of styles in't, from its contradictions to his edition of Phalaris, from its contradictions to itself, from its contradictions to Mr. B.'s character and to his title of Honourable, and from several other topics; it would be taken perhaps for no raillery, but too serious a repartee” (I, lxx). Bentley is here drawing from the judicial “topics” (loci or topoi) that were recommended by ancient rhetors for questioning documents, and he displays a characteristic critical focus on the identity and character of the author.

In the context of the Battle, what is significant about Bentley's judicial approach is that it fails to interact with the conventional rhetorical assumptions of the long-standing querelle des anciens et des modernes. Black has shown that the debate between ancients and moderns was conventionally demonstrative in rhetorical approach.⁴² The debate was geared to the topics of praise and blame: its intention was to praise either ancients or moderns by comparison, and it relied on such standard classical demonstrative strategies as “the celebration of deeds which our hero was the first or only man or at any rate one of the very few to perform,” and the selection of “achievements that are of outstanding importance or unprecedented or unparalleled in their actual character.”⁴³ Aristotle recommended amplification by comparison, which allows the orator to impute superiority to his subject, as especially suitable to demonstrative praise.⁴⁴ It was just such a comparison between ancients and moderns and a praise of the superior literary merits of the ancients, that provided the point of Temple's original essay.

Bentley does not hesitate to dissociate himself from the contest over praise and blame of relative literary merits. In the Dissertation he insists bluntly that “I write without any view or regard to your controversy, which I do not make my own, nor presume to interpose in it” (II, 136). He appears perfectly well aware of the conventional terms of the debate and acknowledges “that some of the oldest books are the best in their kinds, the same person having the double glory of invention and perfection, is a thing observed even by some of the ancients,” adding drily that “the authors they gave this honour to are Homer and Archilochus. … The choice of Phalaris and Aesop, as they are now extant, for the two great inimitable originals, is a piece of criticism of a peculiar complexion, and must proceed from a singularity of palate and judgement” (II, 136). But Bentley dissociates himself from the demonstrative comparison of ancient and modern authors because, as we have seen, he is engaged on a different, judicial project.

Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle has demonstrated that, in the debate between Erasmus and Luther, Erasmus's De libero arbitrio is deliberative in form and strategy, while Luther's De servo arbitrio is judicial. The result of this discrepancy of rhetorical genera was that the two writers' arguments failed to connect, and “fundamentally, each accused the other of speaking off the subject.”⁴⁵ By choosing to respond judicially to Erasmus's deliberative diatribe, Luther did not grapple with Erasmus's arguments on equal terms but struck at the roots of his epistemology. Much the same can be said of Bentley's contribution to the Battle: by employing the judicial genus, he removes himself from the terms of the humanists' debate, using incommensurable argumentative strategies in pursuit of an entirely different kind of goal. Thus, he neither affirms nor denies that the oldest books are the best but proves that the Epistles of Phalaris and Aesop's Fables are not the oldest texts, while expressing surprise, as an aside, that anyone should think them on their own merits superior to Homer. Like critical historians who went about invalidating the fictions of demonstrative historians with their insistence on the evidence of written records, Bentley subverts the terms and assumptions of the humanists' conventional debate between ancients and moderns.

Bentley's judicial scholarship was an ingeniously disruptive rhetorical strategy, sweeping the ground from under Temple's arguments rather than engaging them on their own terms. But the current of feeling in the Battle ran deeper than such a strategy deserved. That there was something more fundamental at stake is suggested by the extent to which Bentley and Swift each regarded the other's kind of exercise as useless or irrelevant. Bentley refused to engage in the literary controversy that later engaged Swift's attention, while Swift, by imitating an Aesopian fable in his response, was making the point that Bentley's scholarship was valueless for the business of effective writing.

The deeper controversy was over the nature of humanism itself. The writing of humanists from Petrarch to Montaigne had been inspired by their understanding of ancient literature: classical scholarship assisted literary practice. But by Bentley's time, classical scholarship had become an end in itself, divorced from and even antagonistic to literary creativity. In the Battle literature and scholarship no longer recognized each other except as quite divergent enterprises or—worse—as enemies.

Swift made the battle over humanism clear. In Boyle's edition of Phalaris it was claimed that Bentley, as librarian, “out of his singular humanity, denied them [i.e. the editors] the further use” of a manuscript of Phalaris (quoted Bentley, II, 173). Bentley responded with familiar scholar's pique (and a revealingly legalistic tone): “Pro singulari sua humanitate! I could produce several letters from learned professors abroad, whose books our Editors may in time be fit to read, wherein these very same words are said to me candidly and seriously” (II, 175). When Swift wrote his Battel, the term “humanity” was particularly resonant in the debate. Swift picked up these resonances and made their implications clear. By the seventeenth century “humanity” not only had familiar modern meanings but also referred to the study of the ancient authors—the disciplines of the “Humanities.” “Humanity” was an English derivation from the family of terms—studia humanitatis, humanista—that were the Renaissance precursors to the nineteenth-century term “humanism.” A humanista was a “humanist,” a teacher or scholar of “humanity,” the studia humanitatis.⁴⁶ Swift, catching up Bentley's claim, has Scaliger remark to Bentley that “Thy Learning makes thee more Barbarous, thy Study of Humanity, more Inhuman” (161).

As a classical scholar, fluent in Greek and Latin and dauntingly erudite, Bentley had impeccable humanist qualifications. But for Swift, Bentley's “Study of Humanity” had made him “Inhuman”; his humanistic “Learning” had made him “Barbarous”—a label that humanists in the Renaissance regularly applied to the Latin of scholastics and other intellectual opponents. In Swift's Aesopian fable Bentley's humanistic studies have turned him into the reverse of a humanist, a scholastic spider in his web who is contrasted with that favorite metaphoric self-image of the humanists, the bee.⁴⁷ Swift, as a classicist rhetorical writer, also had excellent title to be thought a humanist—but the rhetorical, literary humanist is now opposed to the scholarly humanist.⁴⁸ Swift summarizes the paradox that had emerged by the late seventeenth century in the history of humanism: humanism was turned against itself, scholarship against literature.

III

Swift provides one explanation for why these two aspects of humanism should have come adrift in his fable of the spider and the bee. In Swift's fiction the humanist scholar has become a merely bookish spider, locked in the library; while the humanist orator is a bee, ranging at large, reading and gathering experience for the active life. The careers of the two men reinforce the point. Starting as a private tutor, Bentley rose to the position of keeper of all the king's libraries in England and thence to the Mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a prominent, if turbulent, academic career. In brief Bentley's was the career of a professional scholar, a kind of career that only began to be opened up to humanists toward the end of the Renaissance: Grafton observes that “both classical philology and historical chronology became disciplines during the sixteenth century.”⁴⁹ It is a function of the professionalization of scholarship to monopolize competence, withdrawing legitimacy from those non-professional scholars, as Petrarch was, who are henceforth known as “amateurs.”

Like Bentley, Swift had a university training, and both men gloried in the title of Doctor of Divinity. But Swift's career was less straight-forward than Bentley's and he resented more thoroughly the need to court patronage. “Climbing is performed in the same Posture with Creeping,” he observed bitterly, presumably from galling personal experience (245). If Bentley's scholarship is in line of inheritance from the humanists, so are Swift's bitterness about the needs of patronage, and his relentless search for an independent income, personal literary fame and political involvement. In the Renaissance Petrarch was vitriolic about the papal court at Avignon, Machiavelli resentfully chose as dedicatees for his Discourses “not those who are princes, but those who because of their good qualities deserve to be,” and More's character Hythloday in Utopia presents a scathing critique of the dishonesty required of councillors at court.⁵⁰

Gilbert observes of Renaissance humanists that “they hardly ever took part at a policymaking level. … There remained a gap between the humanists and the ruling classes of their time.”⁵¹ The same could be said of Swift: obviously brilliant, he knew all too well that he was underemployed for his talents, kept at a distance from the center of activity in London, and unable to channel his skills as completely into his professional career as Bentley. Bentley's scholarship led him straight toward an academic career, backed by the consciousness that “learned professors abroad” highly approved his work. Swift's literary and political writings lacked the kind of institutional validity that Bentley could claim: he turned to rhetoric, the art of persuasion, as a way of calling attention to opinions (and talents) that he could not express through normal institutional channels. Thus, while Bentley as a scholar exposed the true author of the Epistles of Phalaris as a forging “Sophist” addicted to rhetorical fictions, Swift entered on an ambiguous literary program that was full of fictions and forgeries. In fact one of Swift's major literary models was Lucian, who had been claimed as the possible forger of Phalaris's Epistles. In J. S. Mill's terms, Swift was a characteristic “eccentric,” an intellectual fulminating brilliantly from the margins of power, while Bentley, if he too was an intellectual novus homo, setting a cat among academic pigeons, was nevertheless able to tailor his capacities more successfully to his professional career.

In this contrast between the two men, Bentley was closer by far than Swift to Kristeller's definition of the humanists as intellectuals who “established the humanities. … As teachers of the humanities, as writers and scholars in the literary and historical disciplines, we have every reason to look upon the Renaissance humanists as our predecessors and professional ancestors.”⁵² Yet Swift was closer to those humanists, from Petrarch to Montaigne, whose writings emerged not from their professional careers but on the contrary from the otium that they were able to cultivate outside their work. Bentley became a professional scholar: Swift became a churchman who incidentally wrote satires and pamphlets. John O. Ward has argued in the context of twelfth-century humanism that “‘humanist’ literature is primarily the expression of social marginality: its authors operate on the margins of the established world of their day.”⁵³ Swift was just such another marginal figure, overtained and underemployed, and one who suffered the charge of insanity that always threatens such intellectuals, as Shakespeare saw in his portrait of Hamlet.

IV

The contrast between Bentley's and Swift's careers may elucidate a further, fundamental divide between the two writers' contributions to the Battle. I have argued that Petrarch was interested in Cicero as the author of texts because he wanted to understand Cicero as a fallible homo, a man just like himself, rather than be constrained to see him only as an auctoritas, an authority, a canonical text. Only in this way, by understanding Cicero as a man, could Petrarch make the orator's writings live again, comprehensible as the thoughts of a man with whom he could identify and whom he could thus also imitate. Petrarch wanted to see Cicero not as a book but as a man, not as a text but as a speaking human being. To understand Cicero as a mere man was, for Petrarch, to enable himself to write: “I shall for the most part follow the example of Cicero … in these letters. … Cicero restricted his philosophical concerns to his books and included in his letters accounts of the highly personal, unusual and varied goings-on of his time.”⁵⁴ If Petrarch's understanding of Cicero was gained at the cost of copious reading and scholarship, it was a scholarship that assisted rather than hindered his own creative writing.

Nevertheless, it is rarely remarked how thoroughly paradoxical Petrarch's thinking—and that of humanists in general—was. Professionally, the humanists were defined by their sophisticated and elite literacy. The humanists of the Renaissance were the intellectual and literary cream that floated to the surface of a rapidly growing pool of literate professionals—a pool created by the revolution in literacy that is associated especially with the administrative and legal reforms of the twelfth century and with what J. K. Hyde calls the “veritable explosion in higher education” in thirteenth-century Italy.⁵⁵ The immediate effect of this revolution of literacy was to produce an exaggerated respect for the written word.

What is paradoxical is that the humanists, elite successors to this revolution in literacy, were in some respects in rebellion against it. They turned to rhetoric, the art of speech, for their models, and as Gray has shown, “most frequently, … they called themselves ‘orators.’”⁵⁶ In a letter to the grammarian Donato, accompanying his On His Own Ignorance, Petrarch insisted that “you shall read this book, as you are in the habit of listening to me when I tell tales at the fireside on winter nights, rambling along wherever the impulse takes me. I have called it a book, but it is a talk.”⁵⁷

It is yet to be explained why the humanists turned from the book-oriented culture of scholasticism to the oratorical culture of the ancients. But it is probably significant that, as Lauro Martines argues, “humanism … won the attention of men not by going through the established bulwarks of higher learning first, the universities, but by moving around and outside them.”⁵⁸ The culture of the book is associated with stable and legitimated institutions such as monasteries and universities—institutions that were themselves controlled by written regulations and codes. At the core of the culture of the book and at the heart of the medieval revolution in literacy was the written culture of the law, with its characteristic reliance on authenticated and authoritative documents—surrounded by a welter of glosses, commentaries, and attempted resolutions of contradictions.⁵⁹

In an established discipline, its canonical texts readily become its law, whether the corpus iuris, the works of Aristotle, the corpus Hippocraticum or Scripture.⁶⁰ Competitive debate within such a discipline thus tends to take a legalistic course. Bentley advanced the cause of pure scholarship, but his motives and strategy were intensely competitive: by exposing forgeries, correcting his opponents and establishing texts, he undercut Temple's and the wits' scholarly authority (whatever their popular appeal) and established his own professional reputation as an expert in the canon.⁶¹ Ironically, this competitive rhetorical strategy led away from rhetoric. Like Valla before him, Bentley's judicial approach led him to “inartificial” evidence—that which does not belong to the “art” of rhetoric. At its broadest, Bentley's is a grand attempt to describe the culture of ancient Greece. Cicero recommended this kind of project to the student of law who “has throughout the common law, and in the priestly books and Twelve Tables, a complete picture of the olden time, since a primitive antiquity of language can be studied there, and certain forms of pleading reveal the manners and the way of life of our fore-runners.”⁶² Though Cicero argued that this study was valuable for the public orator, it could also contract into its own specialist legal expertise—that of the iurisperitus. Similarly, Bentley advanced a contraction of humanist learning into specialist philology.

By contrast the humanists initially won attention not only by going around the universities but also by cultivating a more persuasive and flexible, less legalistic and formulaic, writing.⁶³ They operated as men who needed to validate themselves and draw attention to themselves by rhetorical rather than institutional means. It is in this sense that Swift is a true successor of the humanists of the Renaissance. Like theirs, his writing is rhetorical, as spectacular and deliberately shocking as that other marginal attention-seeker, Machiavelli.

The contrast with Bentley is acute. Bentley focusses his attention on the authorship of Phalaris's Epistles, but he is not concerned to understand the human author of a text as Petrarch was: his concern is above all to authenticate a document. Bentley's is a book-oriented and legalistic mental culture. Bentley himself made his own legalism entirely clear. It was Swift who put his finger on the extent to which Bentley was embedded in the scholastic culture of the book, sharing the exaggerated respect for authenticated documents that is characteristic of institutionalized literates. Swift sees Bentley, the librarian, as a spider in a web of books who kills the past and gloats over the textual bodies of dead authors.⁶⁴ By contrast the satirist's own humanist bee ranges over the open, if less secure, fields that lie outside the world of the book.

Swift's satire is, far more deeply than is usually recognized, a rejection of Bentley's judicial culture of the book. The critic exposes forgeries: Swift published his Battel as part of an elaborate fiction of forged authorship.⁶⁵ The critical historian will admit only authenticated documents as evidence: Swift wrote his pamphlet as a history, A Full and True Account, of events that are not only incredible but entirely fabulous. Bentley's Dissertation is redolent with complaints about late Antique Sophists: Swift's satire recalls the fabulous Verae historiae of one such rhetorician, Lucian, who had been credited by some scholars with writing the Epistles of Phalaris, and it includes a “forged” Aesopian fable for good measure. The spider-librarian kills ancient authors: Swift's fantasy brings them all to life. Bentley is concerned with which book belongs where in an accurate chronology: Swift has them all alive, talking, and acting at the same time. From top to bottom Swift's fantasy is Bentley's facts turned upside-down. If, as Swift says in his Preface, “Satyr is a sort of Glass,” then it is Lewis Carrol's sort of glass which reverses what it mirrors (140).

In describing Bentley's and Swift's controversy, I have borrowed Swift's own title of a “Battle” rather than adopt the more conventional label of a querelle. I have done so because I believe Swift understood that the controversy involved was not the conventional querelle des anciens et des modernes. It was, as he claimed, a Battle of the Books. It was a battle between two approaches to writing and texts—between a judicial respect for the authenticated book or document, and a humanist commitment to the creative activity of writing.

Swift made no mistake that he was writing a book. On the contrary he called attention to the physical presence and limitations of the page by incorporating footnotes and obtrusive asterisks marking parts of his document that had supposedly been lost—“hic pauca desunt.” But Swift is concerned with the creative possibilities—the subversions, parodies, reversals and games—that can be played with books. Swift is as much concerned with breaking the rules of books as Bentley is presented as being concerned to chain them down or file them away. His asterisks, for instance, draw attention to gaps in the reliability and completeness of the printed book. Swift yearns, along with his humanist bee, for the open fields outside the rule of the book, as surely as Bentley is concerned to classify and to authenticate.

Neither Bentley nor Swift belonged to the Establishment. Bentley was a novus homo, and he used his judicial technique as a weapon against entrenched interests. When Swift's “Bookseller” tells us that “the Town highly resented to see a person of Sir William Temple's Character and Merits, roughly used by the two Reverend Gentlemen aforesaid” (i.e., Wotton and Bentley), he tells us a great deal about the oppressive pressure of the unwritten code of class and status against which Bentley fought with legalistic determination (139). Bentley's legalism, which he applied not only to Phalaris but also to his aristocratic detractors, was itself a rhetorical strategy in the battle for recognition. But Bentley's was the rhetoric of professional institutional legitimacy, and he reaped its rewards of place.

Swift, aspiring to an aristocratic independence that he could not attain, tended to fall between stools: he supported the Establishment, but he did so for the most part as a Tory in opposition. Bentley, aggressive and touchy a new man as he was, spoke the language of professional legitimacy; Swift, no less touchy but less legalistic, yearned for open fields that were sealed in written contract to other owners. He was a brilliant manipulator of the word and parodist of the text, but he could not challenge the power of the mundane, notarized, and authenticated document. By contrast, Bentley, the supporter of the Moderns, was a professional man who understood the legitimacy of the authenticated document very well and successfully pursued the route of professionalism toward social mobility.⁶⁶

In the struggle for power Swift was on the losing side. In history he stands as a conservative opponent to a triumphant Whiggism. This is not to say, however, that his writing has lost either its vitality or its relevance. Ironically (but appropriately), it is Bentley who has been consumed in the inexorable turnover of scholarly progress. Swift, the “eccentric” and outsider, the rhetorical and humanist opponent to the rule of the book, continues to speak to the children of Mill as a living literary and intellectual force.

Notes

1. See Hans Baron, “The Querelle of the Ancients and the Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship,” Renaissance Essays from the Journal of the History of Ideas, ed. Paul O. Kristeller and Philip P. Wiener (New York, 1968), 95-114. An excellent recent study of the querelle in the Renaissance is Robert Black, “Ancients and Moderns in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and History in Accolti's Dialogue on the Preeminence of Men of His Own Time,” JHI, 43 (1982), 3-32.

2. “Ancients and Moderns Reconsidered,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15 (1981-82), 83, 88. Levine's essay includes a good survey of scholarship concerning the Battle.

3. “Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts: Comments on Some Commentaries,” Renaissance Quarterly, 38 (1985), 620.

4. “The Transition from Renaissance to Baroque: The Case of Italian Historiography,” History and Theory, 19 (1980), 34. See also the stimulating study by William J. Bouwsma, “Three Types of Historiography in Post-Renaissance Italy,” History and Theory, 4 (1964-65), 303-14. For a similar development in England, see Denys Hay, Annalists and Historians: Western Historiography From the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1977), 133-68.

5. Classic studies on the place of rhetoric in humanism are by Paul Oskar Kristeller, many of them now collected in his Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney (New York, 1979). See also Hanna H. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” Renaissance Essays from the Journal of the History of Ideas, 199-216; Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton, 1968); Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton, 1970); Bouwsma, The Culture of Renaissance Humanism, American Historical Association Pamphlets, No. 401 (Washington, 1973).

6. “Substance and Form in Renaissance Humanism,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 7 (1977), 32; cf. Bouwsma, “Changing Assumptions in Later Renaissance Culture,” Viator, 7 (1976), 421-40. A classic and subtle study of Renaissance classicism is Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm, 1960).

7. References to Bentley in this essay are to The Works of Richard Bentley, ed. Alexander Dyce (2 vols; London, 1836). References to Swift are to A Tale of a Tub With Other Early Writings 1696-1707, ed. Herbert Davis (Vol. I of The Collected Prose Works) (Oxford, 1957). Standard biographies of Bentley are by James Henry Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley, D. D. (2 vols.; London, 1833), and R. C. Jebb, Bentley, English Men of Letters (London, 1882), both of which are better than R. J. White, Dr. Bentley: A Study in Academic Scarlet (London, 1965); and of Swift by Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (3 vols.; London, 1962-83). A close study of the relevant years of Swift's life is by A. C. Elias, Jr., Swift at Moor Park: Problems in Biography and Criticism (Philadelphia, 1982).

8. Burke discusses and translates the letter in his The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London, 1969), 50-54.

9. Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970), 19-50.

10. “Clio and the Lawyers: Forms of Historical Consciousness in Medieval Jurisprudence,” Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, No. 5 (1974), 38.

11. See, for instance, Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and tr. H. E. Butler (4 vols.; Cambridge, Mass., 1920-22), V. v.

12. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge, 1986), 168.

13. De partitione oratoria, ed. and tr. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), 132.

14. “Retorica e ideologia nella Declamatio di Lorenzo Valla sulla donazione di Costantino,” Paragone, 29, no. 338 (1978), 36-56.

15. The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance Florence (Urbana, 1970), 24. See also J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957).

16. See Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York, 1963), 127-30. John Selden is a good English example of the “legal philologist”: see The Historie of Tithes (1618; rpt. New York, 1969), Preface. On the political, argumentative motivation of Selden's scholarship, see Paul Christianson, “Young John Selden and the Ancient Constitution, ca. 1610-1618.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 128 (1984), 271-315.

17. Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago, 1983), 16.

18. On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others, tr. Hans Nachod, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Chicago, 1948), 87.

19. Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, 1964), 13.

20. Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarum libri, tr. Aldo S. Bernardo (3 vols; Albany, 1975, and Baltimore, 1982-85), III, 232.

21. The Complete Works of Montaigne, tr. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, 1957), 115, 302.

22. Le familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco, (4 vols.; Florence, 1933-42), XXIV.ii.13 (IV, 224). On Petrarch's new emphasis on familiarity, see A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1984), 211-17.

23. Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton, 1983), 156.

24. See especially Logan, “The Relation of Montaigne to Renaissance Humanism,” JHI, 36 (1975), 613-32; and The Meaning of More's “Utopia” (Princeton, 1983).

25. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton, 1983), 119. A classic study of the seventeenth-century “crisis of the European consciousness” is Paul Hazard, The European Mind 1680-1715, tr. J. Lewis May (1953; rpt. Harmondsworth, 1964).

26. “Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts,” 642.

27. The different genera in Renaissance humanist literature are discussed in more detail by Tinkler, “Renaissance Humanism and the genera eloquentiae,” Rhetorica, 5 (1987), 279-309.

28. Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, 242.

29. “Innovation in Early Humanist Rhetoric: The Oratory of Pier Paulo Vergerio the Elder,” Rinascimento, 22 (1982), 9. On humanists' use of both the demonstrative and deliberative genera, see Tinkler, “Praise and Advice: Rhetorical Approaches in More's Utopia and Machiavelli's Prince,” The Sixteenth Century Journal (forthcoming).

30. See Tinkler, “The Rhetorical Method of Francis Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry VII,” History and Theory, 26 (1987), 32-52.

31. Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton, 1965), 225.

32. The “Art” of Rhetoric, ed. and tr. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), I.iii.4.

33. Rh. I.ii.2. The relationship between judicial and demonstrative historiography is discussed in more detail by Tinkler, “Humanist History and the English Novel in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in Philology (forthcoming).

34. Inst. III.vii.28.

35. A Defence of Poesy, ed. Jan van Dorsten (London, 1966), 37.

36. Brian Stock observes that “the rise of forgery rather than its detection is about as good a witness as we have to the growth of general legal expertise”: The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983), 60.

37. M. T. Clanchy argues that “forged documents were often based on earlier authentic documents or on good oral traditions. The purpose of forgery was to produce a record in a form which was acceptable, particularly in courts of law, at the time it was made”: From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (London, 1979), 249. See also the “Introduction” by Eleanor Searle (ed.), The Chronicle of Battle Abbey (Oxford, 1980).

38. C. O. Brink has recently examined Bentley's role in “the emergence of true scholarship” in a very insular context: English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman (Cambridge, 1986). Less encomiastic and more persuasive is E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (Berkeley, 1974), 71-74. Jebb discusses Bentley's debating tactics revealingly: Bentley, 68 ff.

39. See Monk, Bentley, I, 91-92.

40. See Franklin, Jean Bodin, 130.

41. See Tinkler, “The Rhetorical Method of Bacon's Henry”; and “Humanism as Discourse: Studies in the Rhetorical Culture of Renaissance Humanism, Petrarch to Bacon” (Diss. Queen's, 1983), 79-99. It should be added that judicial rhetoric had long been applied to fields that were not strictly forensic: see, for instance, Robert Dick Sider, Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian (London, 1971). On the (neglected) importance of lawyers in intellectual history, see Bouwsma, “Lawyers and Early Modern Culture,” American Historical Review, 78 (1973), 303-27.

42. “Ancients and Moderns in the Renaissance.”

43. Inst. III.vii.16; Cicero, De oratore, ed. and tr. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), II.347.

44. Rh. I.ix.38-40.

45. Rhetoric and Reform: Erasmus' Civil Dispute with Luther, Harvard Historical Monographs, Vol. LXXI (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 94. Boyle further links Luther's rhetorical stance to a Stoic epistemology and Erasmus's to a Skeptical epistemology. On the relationship between formal rhetorical genus and substantive content, see the classic study by Hans Baron, “Imitation, Rhetoric, and Quattrocento Thought in Bruni's Laudatio,” From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature (Chicago, 1968), 151-71; John W. O'Malley, “Content and Rhetorical Forms in Sixteenth-Century Treatises on Preaching,” Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley, 1983), 238-52; and Tinkler, “Praise and Advice.”

46. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Humanity”; and Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, 21-22.

47. On the apian metaphor see G. W. Pigman III, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), esp. 2-9.

48. On Swift's classicist rhetoric see Charles Allen Beaumont, Swift's Classical Rhetoric (Athens, Geo., 1961), and more recently, Thomas R. Thornburg, Swift and the Ciceronian Tradition (Muncie, Ind., 1980).

49. Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, I, Textual Criticism and Exegesis (Oxford, 1983), 3. See also Kelley, “History as a Calling: The Case of La Popelinière,” Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (Dekalb, Ill., 1971), 771-89.

50. Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, in The Chief Works and Others, tr. Allan Gilbert, (3 vols.; Durham, N. C., 1965), I, 188-89; see also Petrarch's Book Without a Name: A Translation of the Liber sine nomine, by Norman P. Zacour (Toronto, 1973).

51. “Bernardo Rucellai and the Orti Oricellari: A Study on the Origin of Modern Political Thought,” History: Choice and Commitment (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 242.

52. “Studies on Renaissance Humanism during the Last Twenty Years,” Studies in the Renaissance, 9 (1962), 23.

53. “Gothic Architecture, Universities and the Decline of the Humanities in Twelfth Century Europe,” Principalities, Powers and Estates: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Government and Society, ed. L. O. Frappell (Adelaide, S. A., 1979), 68; cf. Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and their Critics, 1100-1215 (Stanford, 1985), 131-83. On the role of otium and marginality in Renaissance humanist culture, see Tinkler, “Renaissance Humanism and the genera eloquentiae.”

54. Letters, I, 10.

55. Society and Politics in Medieval Italy: The Evolution of Civil Life, 1000-1350 (London, 1973), 167. An excellent study of the growth in importance of writing in medieval England is Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. On the growing importance of intellectuals before the Renaissance, see Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (1978; rpt. Oxford, 1985).

56. “Renaissance Humanism,” 202.

57. “On His Own Ignorance,” 47.

58. Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1979), 277-78; cf. Gene A. Brucker, “Florence and Its University, 1348-1434,” Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of E. H. Harbison, ed. Theodore K. Rabb and Jerrold E. Seigel (Princeton, 1969), 220-36—although see also the cautionary remarks of Peter Denley, “Recent Studies on Italian Universities of the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” History of Universities, 1 (1981), 193-205.

59. Murray observes of medieval universities that “at the top of the lucrative sciences stood law”: Reason and Society, 224. For a stimulating argument about the relationship between legal and scholastic technique, see George Makdisi, “The Scholastic Method in Medieval Education: An Inquiry into Its Origins in Law and Theology,” Speculum, 49 (1974), 640-61.

60. On the role of an authoritative “paradigm” in institutionalized disciplines, see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. II, No. 1, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1970). Galen can be seen advancing his own authority by claiming possession of the authentic interpretation of Hippocrates in the study by Wesley D. Smith, The Hippocratic Tradition (Ithaca, N. Y., 1979). Sider observes that “Tertullian was quick to see that the written documents of the advocate's world invited a ready comparison with the biblical documents of the church, and that the rules provided by rhetoric for controversies over the former might well work for struggles arising out of the latter”: Art of Tertullian, 85.

61. On the role of competitiveness in philological scholarship, see Grafton, Scaliger, I, 9-44.

62. De or. I. 193.

63. See John F. McGovern, “The Documentary Language of Mediaeval Business, A. D. 1150-1250,” The Classical Journal, 67 (1971-72), 227-39.

64. The great Hellenist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff does not entirely disagree, observing that Bentley's Dissertation “establishes the facts, but that is only a means to an end. Scholarship of this kind can purify an author's text … but it cannot bring his work to life”: The History of Classical Scholarship, tr. Alan Harris (London, 1982), 82.

65. It should be added by way of qualification that serious forgery is in its way as scholarly an enterprise as its detection: Swift's “forgery” is parodic, tending to confuse and deflate the importance of questions of authenticity and forgery.

66. On the legal and political uses of antiquarian scholarship, see Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton 1586-1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1979). On the symbiosis between the landed elite and the professions (especially public officials and lawyers) in the eighteenth century, see Lawrence and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540-1880, abridged ed. (Oxford, 1986), 283. The Stones also point out the growing enthusiasm of some members of the elite for collecting and antiquarian studies (220-23). Monk estimates the income from Bentley's several preferments at 1300-1400 pounds a year: Bentley, II, 414. For Swift, the Deanery of St. Patrick's was a financially valuable preferment, but it was isolated from his friends and from the center of power.