Abstract: “‘Vindicating’ Homer: Negotiating Religious, Literary and Historical Value in the Search for the Trojan War”
Responding to John Morritt’s Vindication of Homer […] in answer to two late publications of Mr Bryant (1798), Jacob Bryant begins by taking issue with the word ‘vindication’. He wonders why Morritt has wasted so much effort ‘to vindicate where there was no grievance; and to maintain what was never denied’ about Homer’s value (Observations on A Vindication of Homer, 1799). This usefully pedantic quibble reveals that, whatever else they were arguing about, they were arguing about what and how value could be ascribed to Homer in the late eighteenth century. Ostensibly Bryant and Morritt were debating the historical reality of the Trojan War, a 2000-year-old argument whose latest manifestation in England had been triggered by the venerable controversialist Bryant when he took exception to Jean Baptiste Le Chevalier’s Description of the Plain of Troy (1792).
Current scholarly opinion sees this instalment of the argument as a proxy for Enlightenment anxieties about religious faith and specifically the Bible’s status as the source of revealed truth in the face of modern historiographical and philological enquiry. What could be done to Homer could be done to the Bible. For Morritt, Le Chevalier soothed these anxieties by using empiricist fieldwork to validate textual truth; while Bryant’s socio-historical and philological scepticism undermined the credibility of Homer (and therefore any ancient text) to relate “History” with any degree of accuracy. In the febrile atmosphere of the 1790s, this was cultural dynamite. Bryant, long-time defender of orthodoxy and establishment, ended his career vilified as a heretic and Jacobin iconoclast.
Taking its cue from Bryant’s complaint about Morrill’s need to ‘vindicate’ Homer, my paper explores a missing and importantly qualifying dimension to this interpretation. I will demonstrate that Bryant argues for a notion of aesthetic and culture value for Homer as a work of literature separate from Le Chevalier’s tenuous claims to historical truth. Indeed, to the extent that those claims could only be maintained by relegating or explaining away many of the features that Bryant saw of greatest value in Homer, Bryant argues that the demands of historical accuracy and of literary art are antithetical.
Having made this argument about competing ways of valuing Homer in this debate, my paper will suggest its relevance to the conference and English Romantic studies more widely. Bryant (who after all was born in 1715) emerges as an unlikely proponent of the ‘Romantic ideology’. More significantly the paper contributes to re-examinations of the relationship between religious, literary and political discourse within English Romanticism, including the unexpected connections between literary criticism and Anglican apologetics. The continued importance of religion and the aftershocks of religious debate in broader cultural discourse remains an underappreciated facet of Romantic studies. My paper’s engagement in questions and distinctions of religious, historical and literary value will therefore allow the conference to explore another aspect of the period’s ‘negotiation of value’.
Bio: University of Plymouth, UK
Dr Dafydd Moore is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Plymouth, UK. I am widely published on James Macpherson and The Poems of Ossian and the Romantic antiquarian, controversialist and divine Richard Polwhele. Amongst many publications, I am the author of Enlightenment and Romance in the Poems of Ossian(2003); Richard Polwhele and Romantic Culture (2021); and the contributing editor of Ossian and Ossianism(4 vols, 2004) and The International Companion to James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (2017).