In the Netherlands, courses on the History of the Humanities (HoH) were first introduced at Utrecht University around 2010 as part of the master’s program in History and Philosophy of Science and Humanities. These courses aimed to provide a long-term, comparative overview of humanistic disciplines from antiquity to the present. For background reading, students used Bod’s A New History of the Humanities alongside specialized primary sources in fields such as philology, poetics, historiography and art history.
In 2012, the University of Amsterdam also began offering HoH, introducing it as an elective within the honors program of the Faculty of Humanities. Approximately 15 students enrolled each year. Similar to Utrecht, Bod’s book served as foundational reading, while the course theme varied annually, covering topics such as “Global Perspectives” and “Crises in the Humanities”. After completing the honors program, students had the option to write their master’s thesis on HoH, with a few continuing their studies at the doctoral level.
Student experiences with studying HoH from a global, comparative perspective were mixed. The challenge lay in engaging with the HoH of such diverse disciplines like philology, musicology, theater studies, linguistics, art history and film studies. Many students expressed a preference for thematic approaches or case studies over extensive historical overviews. At the same time, they often required a background text to contextualize the specific themes or cases being studied.
After 12 years of offering this course, we found that a “best practice” approach involves starting with a specific problem in HoH and demonstrating how scholars from different historical periods addressed it. For instance, in one year, students replicated the experiment of the Greek historian and rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who tested the Stoic rules for constructing “beautiful” sentences. Dionysius discovered that these rules applied to only a minority of Homer’s sentences, leading him to reject the Stoic criteria. In another year, students explored Lachmann’s stemmatic method for reconstructing an original text from surviving copies. They then explored alternative approaches designed to enhance Lachmann’s method, examining how these techniques are applied in contemporary source reconstruction, particularly in the context of the International Court of Justice.
This problem-based approach, which explores concrete issues and their solutions over time, appears to be a promising method of teaching HoH.