La filologia in guerra

The paper aims to investigate the contribution that European philologists (above all Bedier, Wadstein, Kuttner and, among the Italians, Pasquali, Vitelli, Ramorino) gave to their respective countries in arms during the First World War. The engagement of Italian philologists is part of a wider movement of intellectuals’ enlistment, which involved all warring nations, from Russia to the United States. To review the role of Italian philologists will also offer the occasion to re-visit the heated debate that developed in Italy during the first decades of the 20th century on the value and meaning of the term “philology”. The debate not only focussed on specific aspects and contents of the philological method, but questioned the legitimacy of philology itself: encouraged by the outbreak of the First World War, it acquired rough anti-German nationalistic trends in the reflection of some scholars (i.e. Fraccaroli and, with demagogical and coarser nuances, Romagnoli). Against Fraccaroli and Romagnoli’s anti-philological crusade stood, with different sensibilities and purposes, the philological school of Florence, led by Vitelli, and the Società Italiana per la Diffusione e l’Incoraggiamento degli Studi Classici di Firenze, with one of its most important members, Ramorino. Both Vitelli and Ramorino warned against the dangers of rejecting the German philological tradition all together and against the possible negative consequences of this choice on the Italian academic and scientific process