ABSTRACT
What are scholarly virtues and vices and why do they matter to historians of the humanities? This introduction argues that virtues and vices (objectivity, loyalty, dogmatism) were key terms in an evaluative discourse on which scholars drew in articulating their standards of scholarly excellence. Also, they used this idiom in assessing the achievements of others, most notably in book reviews or scholarly debates. With the example of Goethe philology in German literary studies around 1900, the introduction discusses three different ways in which this discourse can be studied. It argues that a rhetorical approach is the most fruitful of these, as it helps historians grasp not only the referential aspects of scholars’ language but also its performative dimensions (the things that scholars did with words).
