Floris Solleveld
Biographic Data
| ID | 1436791 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Floris Solleveld |
| GIVEN NAMES | Floris |
| FAMILY NAME | Solleveld |
| SIGNATURE | SOLLEVELD F |
| AFFILIATIONS | KU Leuven |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4457-6223 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Scholarship as Bricolage
Eighteenth-century scholarship is full of hybrid works: works that integrate elements from different fields and genres, sometimes from different authors and different periods, each with their own forms of organization and argumentative/rhetorical structures. This article analyses such hybrid works as documents of changes in the architecture of knowledge. Applying Ian Hacking’s notion of “styles of reasoning” to the history of the humanities, it s…
Celebrating a Decade of History of Humanities
The Linguistics Wars
The Holy Word Factory
The Protestant missionary movement played a key role in colonial language dynamics and conceptual change, and one way in which it did so was through translation. The process of registering and standardising languages for the sake of missionary translation was a global phenomenon that acquired industrial proportions in the nineteenth century with mass-produced catechisms, primers, and cheap Bibles and Gospels. That global translation industry not …
Überreichweiten
The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities
A Science of Letters? Forms of “Normal Science” in the Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Humanities
Was there anything like “normal science” in the early modern humanities? The term humanities itself, though going back to early humanist studia humanitatis, is problematic to use for early modern scholarship, since it mainly indicated a (propaedeutic) curriculum. What we now call the humanities were known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as “letters.” Different, overlapping container notions were also in use: rhetoric and belles-lettre…
Between Dogma and Data
Father Wilhelm Schmidt SVD (1868-1954) was one of the great linguistic and ethnological information hoarders of the early 20th century. Through the missionary Society of the Divine Word, he coordinated an army of trained fieldworkers who supplied him with information for his twelve-volume synthesis of world religions, his atlas of the world’s languages, and the journal Anthropos. Schmidt saw himself as practicing Catholic modern science, based on…
Language as a Specimen
Language was never studied by linguists (or philologists) alone. The greater part of the languages of the world was first known in the West through the reports of missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators, and what they documented reflected their specific interests. Missionaries wrote catechisms, primers, dictionaries, and Bible translations (especially Lord's Prayers); for explorers and administrators, language was one aspect among ma…
Language in the Global History of Knowledge
Throughout the history of global contacts, language has been both a means of communication and an obstacle to the transmission of knowledge. Viewed from a global perspective, the history of knowledge is filled with dragomans and munshis, Jesuits in Mandarin robes translating astronomical knowledge one way and Confucian texts the other, bilingual and bicultural intermediaries, trade jargons and cosmopolitan interlanguages. At the same time, while …
Afterlives of the Republic of Letters
What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth …
Lepsius as a linguist
Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–1884) is mainly remembered as a founder of Egyptology. However, the largest share of his published work was about linguistics and philology, going from the decipherment and comparison of ancient writing systems to the classification of African languages. This article explores his linguistic work and the tensions within it: between different areas of expertise, between theory and observation, and between the study of lan…
Expanding the comparative view
Wilhelm von Humboldt'sÜber die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Javacan be seen as the first comparative grammar of non-Indo-European languages. While Humboldt's practice of collecting and re-assembling linguistic information has been documented extensively in the Berlin Academy edition of hisSchriften zur Sprachwissenschaft,this article puts his work in perspective by tracing it back to its sources and treating it as part of a wider parallel process o…
How to Make a Revolution
Works of scholarship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries abounded in programmatic proclamations of new disciplines and critical dismissal of all predecessors. In this article I make an inventory of different kinds of such explicit and implicit revolutionary rhetoric in the study of language and history around 1800. Analyzing these proclamations as performative speech acts, I identify various criteria according to which such spee…
Expanding the comparative view
Wilhelm von Humboldt'sÜber die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Javacan be seen as the first comparative grammar of non-Indo-European languages. While Humboldt's practice of collecting and re-assembling linguistic information has been documented extensively in the Berlin Academy edition of hisSchriften zur Sprachwissenschaft,this article puts his work in perspective by tracing it back to its sources and treating it as part of a wider parallel process o…
Language as a Specimen
Language was never studied by linguists (or philologists) alone. The greater part of the languages of the world was first known in the West through the reports of missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators, and what they documented reflected their specific interests. Missionaries wrote catechisms, primers, dictionaries, and Bible translations (especially Lord's Prayers); for explorers and administrators, language was one aspect among ma…
How to Make a Revolution
Works of scholarship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries abounded in programmatic proclamations of new disciplines and critical dismissal of all predecessors. In this article I make an inventory of different kinds of such explicit and implicit revolutionary rhetoric in the study of language and history around 1800. Analyzing these proclamations as performative speech acts, I identify various criteria according to which such spee…
Afterlives of the Republic of Letters
What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth …
Lepsius as a linguist
Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–1884) is mainly remembered as a founder of Egyptology. However, the largest share of his published work was about linguistics and philology, going from the decipherment and comparison of ancient writing systems to the classification of African languages. This article explores his linguistic work and the tensions within it: between different areas of expertise, between theory and observation, and between the study of lan…
Expanding the comparative view
Wilhelm von Humboldt'sÜber die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Javacan be seen as the first comparative grammar of non-Indo-European languages. While Humboldt's practice of collecting and re-assembling linguistic information has been documented extensively in the Berlin Academy edition of hisSchriften zur Sprachwissenschaft,this article puts his work in perspective by tracing it back to its sources and treating it as part of a wider parallel process o…
A Science of Letters? Forms of “Normal Science” in the Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Humanities
Was there anything like “normal science” in the early modern humanities? The term humanities itself, though going back to early humanist studia humanitatis, is problematic to use for early modern scholarship, since it mainly indicated a (propaedeutic) curriculum. What we now call the humanities were known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as “letters.” Different, overlapping container notions were also in use: rhetoric and belles-lettre…
Between Dogma and Data
Father Wilhelm Schmidt SVD (1868-1954) was one of the great linguistic and ethnological information hoarders of the early 20th century. Through the missionary Society of the Divine Word, he coordinated an army of trained fieldworkers who supplied him with information for his twelve-volume synthesis of world religions, his atlas of the world’s languages, and the journal Anthropos. Schmidt saw himself as practicing Catholic modern science, based on…
Language as a Specimen
Language was never studied by linguists (or philologists) alone. The greater part of the languages of the world was first known in the West through the reports of missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators, and what they documented reflected their specific interests. Missionaries wrote catechisms, primers, dictionaries, and Bible translations (especially Lord's Prayers); for explorers and administrators, language was one aspect among ma…
Language in the Global History of Knowledge
Throughout the history of global contacts, language has been both a means of communication and an obstacle to the transmission of knowledge. Viewed from a global perspective, the history of knowledge is filled with dragomans and munshis, Jesuits in Mandarin robes translating astronomical knowledge one way and Confucian texts the other, bilingual and bicultural intermediaries, trade jargons and cosmopolitan interlanguages. At the same time, while …
Überreichweiten
The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities
Scholarship as Bricolage
Eighteenth-century scholarship is full of hybrid works: works that integrate elements from different fields and genres, sometimes from different authors and different periods, each with their own forms of organization and argumentative/rhetorical structures. This article analyses such hybrid works as documents of changes in the architecture of knowledge. Applying Ian Hacking’s notion of “styles of reasoning” to the history of the humanities, it s…
Celebrating a Decade of History of Humanities
The Linguistics Wars
The Holy Word Factory
The Protestant missionary movement played a key role in colonial language dynamics and conceptual change, and one way in which it did so was through translation. The process of registering and standardising languages for the sake of missionary translation was a global phenomenon that acquired industrial proportions in the nineteenth century with mass-produced catechisms, primers, and cheap Bibles and Gospels. That global translation industry not …
History (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Art (8 works) · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies (7 works) · History (6 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Humanities (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Sociology (5 works)