Publications of the English Goethe Society
Volume LXXXV, Numbers 2-3 (2016)
Special Double Issue
Friedrich Max Müller and the Role of Philology in Victorian Thought
Edited by John R. Davis and Angus Nicholls
Link to the special issue here: 
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ypeg20/85/2-3?nav=tocList

Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) was the first President of the English Goethe Society and delivered the Society’s inaugural lecture, on ‘Goethe and Carlyle’, in 1886. The son of the philhellenic poet Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827), Max Müller studied Sanskrit, comparative philology and the philosophy of mythology with prominent German authorities in these fields, among them Hermann Brockhaus, Franz Bopp, Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Rückert. In 1846, Müller travelled to Britain to prepare a translation of the Rig Veda. This research visit would turn into a lifelong stay after Müller was appointed as Taylor Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford in 1854. Müller’s activities in this position would exert a profound influence on British intellectual life during the second half of the nineteenth-century: his book-length essay on Comparative Mythology (1856) inspired evolutionist thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Edward Burnett Tylor and made philology into one of the master sciences at mid-century; his debates with Charles Darwin and his followers on the origin of language during the 1870s constituted a significant component of religiously informed reactions to Darwin’s ideas about human descent; his arguments concerning the interdependence of language and thought influenced fields such as psychology, neurology, paediatrics and education until the end of the nineteenth century; his 1881 introduction to and translation of Kant’s first Critique was part of an important effort to counter the dominance of British empiricism through an attempted Kant revival; his theories concerning an ‘Aryan’ language that purportedly predated Sanskrit and ancient Greek led to controversial debates on the relations between language, religion and race that arguably had a lasting and in many ways negative influence upon later cultural and political developments in both India and Germany; his ideas concerning the relations between Hinduism and Christianity made a highly contentious contribution to discussions about British colonial and missionary policy in the Indian Subcontinent; and his monumental 50-volume edition of the Sacred Books of the East laid the foundations for the study of comparative religion. With close connections to Victorian politicians such as William Gladstone, as well as to the royal family, Max Müller was one of the most influential Germans in nineteenth-century Britain, and his career is a paradigm case of German-British cultural transfer during the nineteenth century. Müller’s interlocutors and readers included people as various as Alexander von Humboldt, Darwin, Benjamin Jowett, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Henry Maudsley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ferdinand de Saussure, Ernst Cassirer, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jarwaharlal Nehru, and to this day, Goethe Institutes in India carry the name of Max Mueller Bhavan. 

The purpose of this special issue of the Goethe Society’s Publications is to undertake both a comprehensive and a critical assessment of the career and intellectual legacy of its first President. Arising from a conference held at the German Historical Institute in London in 2015, it brings together papers by an international group of experts in German studies, German and British history, linguistics, philosophy, English literary studies, and religious studies in order to examine the many facets of Müller’s scholarship.  

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Friedrich Max Müller: The Career and Intellectual Trajectory of a German Philologist
in Victorian Britain 
John R. Davis and Angus Nicholls 
Kingston University and Queen Mary University of London

SECTION ONE: FRIEDRICH MAX MÜLLER ON LANGUAGE, METAPHOR,
RELIGION AND MYTH

‘Language is our Rubicon’: Friedrich Max Müller’s Quarrel with Hensleigh Wedgwood 
Michela Piattelli 
Sapienza University of Rome

The Victorian Question of the Relation between Language and Thought 
Marjorie Lorch and Paula Hellal 
Birkbeck, University of London

Friedrich Max Müller’s Cultural Concept of Metaphor 
Andreas Musolff 
University of East Anglia

Friedrich Max Müller on Religion and Myth 
Robert A. Segal 
University of Aberdeen

Comparative Mythology as a Transnational Enterprise: Friedrich Max Müller’s Scholarly Identity through the Lens of Angelo De Gubernatis’s Correspondence 
Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn 
CNRS, Ecole normale supérieure, Paris

SECTION TWO: MAX MÜLLER AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES – CONTRIBUTION
AND RECEPTION

Forgotten Bibles: Friedrich Max Müller’s Edition of the Sacred Books of the East 
Arie L. Molendijk
University of Groningen

Parallel Lives: Friedrich Max Müller and William Wright 
Bernhard Maier 
University of Tübingen

‘Vedantist of Vedantists’? The Problem of Friedrich Max Müller’s Religious Identity 
Thomas J. Green 
University of Cambridge

Friedrich Max Müller and George Eliot: Affinities, Einfühlung, and the Science of Religion 
Sarah Barnette 
University of Oxford

‘A reformed Buddhism […] would help in the distant future to bring about a mutual understanding’: Friedrich Max Müller’s Conceptions of Religious Reform, Ecumenical Dialogue and World Peace 
Laurent Dedryvère and Stéphanie Prévost
Paris Diderot – Sorbonne Paris Cité University

Friedrich Max Müller and the Emergence of Identity Politics in India and Germany
Baijayanti Roy
University of Frankfurt am Main


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Kevin Hilliard
Angus Nicholls
W. Daniel Wilson