Geographies of Philological Knowledge

“Fascinating, informative, and sophisticated, . . . the book encompasses a well-focused case study of the intellectual history, reception, and scholarly destiny of Andrés Bello’s early-nineteenth-century edition of the Poem of the Cid (completed in 1834 but not published until 1881). In this way, Altschul’s book constitutes a commendable and profound exploration of Bello’s work and his position in the context of the development of Hispanic philology, nineteenth- and twentieth-century transatlantic cultural relations, and the unspoken ideologies and dogmas that may animate the claims of all academic disciplines.”

“The book complements [Walter] Mignolo’s The Idea of Latin America and Edward Said’s Orientalism. Recommended.”

“Like Michelle Warren’s Creole Medievalism, Nadia R. Altschul’s meticulous and comprehensive study belongs among those fascinating second-wave historiographies of academic medievalism that complicate the traditional monocausal connections drawn between medievalists’ nationality and the ideologies informing their philological practices. Her brilliant study of the medievalist work of polymath Andrés Bello (1781–1865) reveals an example of modern medieval scholarship anchored in a multiplicity of simultaneous subject positions: Creole vis-à-vis Spain; Venezuelan/Chilean vis-à-vis other ‘national’ American identities; Creole vis-à-vis Amerindians; and Creole vis-à-vis populations of African extraction. Within this web of mutually competing and/or reinforcing positionalities, Altschul questions simplistic binarities such as colonial/postcolonial, empire/colony, and indigenous/criollo and enriches our understanding of the constructed quality of the contested intellectual terrain medievalists still inhabit today.”

“Nadia R. Altschul has been responsible for some of the most searching studies of the links between the European premodern past and the colonial enterprise. In her new book, she turns her attention to the Americas and to the central role of Andrés Bello in the formation of Latin American cultural identities. The result is a fundamental rethinking of an apparently authoritative humanism, revealing its Creole status. Beneath Altschul’s lucid and precise prose is a passionate intelligence. It will be welcomed not only by students of Spanish-language literatures but also by those in postcolonial studies and transnational American studies.”

“In this important study, Nadia R. Altschul takes as her point of departure the posthumous 1881 edition by Andrés Bello of the Castilian ‘national epic,’ Poema de mio Cid (largely completed by 1834). In her meditation on the ‘Creole medievalism’ of Bello, Altschul reveals many blind spots in our understandings of postcoloniality and of the historiography of medievalism itself, which, from this study on, cannot be fully understood without reference to the complex role played by Latin American (and, more broadly, American) medievalism—claiming American culture’s medieval European origins even as it introduces a ‘corrupting’ influence into the European medieval-nationalist-philological project—in shaping ideas of nation, of philology, and of the construction of ‘the West.’ One of the signal achievements of this book is that in it, Altschul show us how scholarship that grows out of personal passion and engagement can open up, not blind us to, the complexities of the subjects that move us.”