The fate of Philologus: learning and prattle in early modern religious dialogue

This article examines a number of early modern dialogic works – two by Thomas Fuller and William Nicholls in close detail – in which an antagonistic interlocutor is named ’Philologus‘. Finding a classical precedent in the pastiche of ’aliquis philologus‘ in Seneca’s letters, the article traces how the Philologi came to characterise a certain form of ’learned prattle‘, or an erudite verbosity. Moving through popular Tudor satire and moral drama to contentious and confessionalised seventeenth-century erudition, the article shows how as the seventeenth century progressed, the name ’Philologus‘ came to be associated with the practices and abuses of formal, Latinate ’philology‘, in particular learned criticism of the Bible. What appears by the end of the century is an attempt to undercut the more dangerous arguments of philology – in particular those of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza – by associating them with the trope of the ’learned prattler’, whose immoderate word-loving fundamentally compromised his character and scholarship.