New Philology

New Philology generally refers to a branch of Mexican ethnohistory and philology that uses colonial-era native language texts written by Indians to construct history from the indigenous point of view. The name New Philology was coined by James Lockhart to describe work that he and his doctoral students and scholarly collaborators in history, anthropology, and linguistics had pursued since the mid-1970s. Lockhart published a great many essays elaborating on the concept and content of the New Philology and Matthew Restall published a description of it in the Latin American Research Review. The techniques of the New Philology has also been applied in other disciplines such as European medieval studies.

Some historians publishing in the New Philology tradition are James Lockhart, S.L. (Sarah) Cline, Susan Schroeder, Rebecca Horn, Stephanie Wood, Robert Haskett, Matthew Restall, Lisa Sousa and Kevin Terraciano. Many of these scholars of the first generation of the field were hired by research universities and have trained their own students in the field's methods and techniques. Kevin Terraciano succeeded Lockhart in the History Department at UCLA, following Lockhart's 1994 retirement. Sarah Cline taught at Harvard before moving to University of California Santa Barbara; Susan Schroeder held the France V. Scholes Chair at Tulane University; Rebecca Horn teaches at University of Utah; Stephanie Wood and Robert Haskett teach at University of Oregon; Lisa Sousa teaches at Occidental College, and Matthew Restall holds an endowed chair at Penn State University.

Lockhart's discusses philology and in particular the new philology in an essay for a collection of essays hosted digitally at University of Oregon. For him, the new philology was built upon the foundation of the old, which focuses on close reading of texts and resulted in collections of printed documentation. An important nineteenth-century Mexican philologist was Joaquín García Icazbalceta. In Mexico and Latin America, nineteenth-century scholars mined the Spanish archives for colonial documentation for their national histories. A feature of the New Philology is that the publication of indigenous texts in the original language with translations with introductions was standard. The translated texts often appeared first, followed by a separate scholarly monograph analyzing the texts. The two should be considered two parts of the same scholarly publication. Many of the scholars working in the New Philology did so before it gained that designation. A particularly valuable online publication are essays where individual scholars discuss the process and product of translating and publishing particular native language documentation.

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