Preliminary Programme

As co-founder of the Viennese Academic Wagner Society in 1873 Guido Adler was one of the numerous fervent adherents of the composer among the young intellectuals and artists in Vienna. In this society as well as in the Reading Society of the German Students in Vienna Wagner’s music was discussed as an artistic answer to the shortcomings of political liberalism. His writings – as well as those of Nietzsche – reinforced the idea among the students that art – and not science – is the solution for a future society.
Some ten years later in his famous declaration of the “Scope, Method and Aim of Musicology” (1885) Adler made great efforts to give scientific dignity to musicology as a new university discipline, to separate musicological writing from other forms of writing about music and to conceptualize the musicologist as educator of the composer. Still an admirer of Wagner’s music he started to discern the composer Wagner from the writer. Especially Wagner’s critical attitude towards science and research provoked a passionate acknowledgement of scientific achievements on Adler’s side, leading in 1903 to a skirmish with his former student Richard Batka.
In his book on Richard Wagner (1904, 21923), resulting from lectures he gave at the university of Vienna, Adler tried to separate his personal adoration of the composer from the scientific treatment of the topic. Anxious to find a “dry” and austere language, which is characteristic of Adler’s style, his monograph as will be shown testifies both, his passion for music and musicology.
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Scholarly reviews are of great significance for the making of the historical discipline in the nineteenth century. In close connection with the increasingly professional periodical as a medium, reviews and critics made an important contribution to the standardization and specialization of this discipline. Although generally accepted standards and principles for writing a review have never been established, virtues as “objectivity” and “truthfulness” were often associated with the genre of the review: On the one hand they became a valuation basis for reviewing an author’s or editors book, on the other hand these skills also were expected from the critical reviewer himself, whose “eagle eye”, spotting everything, should pass very quickly through the volumes under review - even before opening them. The process of evaluating and criticizing often was enmeshed in emotional states which give an insight not only in a lot of individual and professional approaches but also in the reciprocity of the hierarchical working structure and the egalitarian ideal meant for researchers.
The paper’s intention is to elucidate these reciprocities, which are significant for the scholarly discourse in the late nineteenth century and often correlate with professional resources as well as with national claims. It focuses on an examination of the review section of the “Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung” as well as on the correspondence between the reviewers and the editors of this periodical. It has been published since 1880 and its initiators aimed at representing the historical disciplines which had been developed and taught at the Institute, which was founded in 1854: above all auxiliary specializations such as paleography, diplomatics and archival science. Accordingly, we find a large number of reviews of unwieldy source editions and other books strongly based on material taken from the archives. These texts allow us to look at the power relations between reviewer and author. They also shed light on social and scholarly as well as national differences, which were in some cases responsible for hard criticism and a few heated controversies. Furthermore the paper shall show to which extent the process of judging evidence and of criticizing an author was closely linked to emotional expressions as - for example - the feeling of superiority associated with a nationally biased scientific ideal.
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Objectivity, impartiality, intellectual honesty, and love of truth usually ranked high among the epistemic virtues advocated by nineteenth-century humanities scholars (philologists, historians, art historians, church historians, etc.) concerned about the “scientific” status of their emerging academic disciplines. One reason for the decline in popularity of these “ascetic” epistemic virtues in the twentieth century is that they were (increasingly) identified with impassionateness, or a state of emotionlessness, which in turn was regarded as both impossible and undesirable. But was love of truth really a love without passion? Could honesty really exist without emotional support? This paper argues that it would be quite wrong to identity such nineteenth-century epistemic virtues as objectivity, honesty, and love of truth with emotionless scholarship. In order to substantiate this claim, the paper zooms in on Abraham Kuenen (1828-1891), a Semitic philologist known across Europe as a razor-sharp critic, whose work set new standards for “scientific” study of the Old Testament. There was nothing Kuenen valued higher than impartial study and objective judgment. At the same time, a German admirer noted that Kuenen seemed to write “with the blood of his heart.” The paper argues that this was no contradiction. For Kuenen, love of truth was a passionate emotion, not only because it made one wholeheartedly committed to certain epistemic goods (e.g., knowledge, understanding, insight), but also because such goods had always to be defended against what Kuenen called “apologists,” who were blinded by religious biases, and “the power of tradition,” which he resisted on both scholarly and religious grounds. Kuenen argued, moreover, that lovers of truth not seldom have to suffer for their passions, or even reach a state of scholarly martyrdom, as in the case of John William Colenso (1814-1883), whose reputation and career were significantly damaged by ecclesial accusations of heresy. So, why did Kuenen held before his students the example of Colenso? And why did nineteenth-century humanities scholars more generally believe that objectivity and impartiality required love of truth? In both cases, the answer is that Kuenen and his contemporaries, perhaps not incorrectly, believed epistemic virtues to be rooted in passion, love, and desire. (Show less)