Sex and Scholarship

This chapter looks at examples of scholars who, in the early eighteenth century, worked on texts that were highly controversial from a moral perspective. The focus is on Pieter Burman’s edition of Petronius (1709) and Bentley’s work on Horace. Looking at this material from a perspective of textual criticism allowed Burman and Bentley to avoid delving too deeply into passages of a sexually loaded nature. Nevertheless, political and scholarly opponents of both men tried to blacken their reputation by connecting their research interests with their private lives. It is demonstrated that the association of textual critics with immorality was a commonplace in early modern Europe and that the tensions between in particular Burman and his opponents reveals a struggle to make classical philology a more independent field of enquiry versus other disciplines, such as theology.