The Alleged Crisis of Classics and the Engagement with Theory in Ancient Mediterranean Studies: A Statistical Analysis of L'Année philologique

Abstract

In “Who Killed Homer?” Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath identify approaches and theories borrowed from gender and postcolonial studies as the cause of the alleged “crisis” of classics. However, L'Année philologique, the most comprehensive bibliographical database dealing with ancient Mediterranean studies and classics, shows that there are no reasons to speak of a crisis as far as the volume of publications in ancient Mediterranean studies is concerned. It also demonstrates that the relative number of publications in large research areas has remained roughly the same for the last hundred years. Against anecdotal evidence suggesting that gender and postcolonial studies have affected the methods and objectives of ancient Mediterranean studies, a comparison of L'Année philologique with other databases suggests that scholars in the field have one of the lowest rates of engagement with “theory” in the humanities (here represented by concepts and authors typical of gender studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, sociology, the Frankfurt school, and psychoanalysis).