TY - JOUR
TI - Scholarship, community formation and book reviews: The Literarisches Centralblatt as arena and meeting place
AU - Engberts, Christiaan
TI - Scholarship, community formation and book reviews: The Literarisches Centralblatt as arena and meeting place
AB - 
	Book reviews serve multiple functions. They are not only used to assess the merit of individual books but also contribute to the creation and maintenance of scholarly communities.

	This paper draws on nineteenth-century book reviews to outline three of their features that contributed to the selfdefinition of such communities: the assessment of books, the assessment of authors, and the use of positive and negative politeness strategies to address individual authors as well as a broader audience.

	The analysis will be based on the book reviews of the German Semitist Theodor Nöldeke and the experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt in the Literarisches Centralblatt in the eighteenseventies. In their book reviews they both criticized and praised their peers, which turned review journals like the Centralblatt in arenas for polemic debate as well as meeting places for likeminded scholars.

	To be more precise, book reviews were used to communicate standards of scholarly excellence, expectations of the character and skills of scholars, and the acknowledgement of the value of the continued existence of aims and interests shared among a large group of academically educated and employed scholars. By contributing to the establishment and maintenance of scholarly peer groups with shared values, book reviews also reinforced the dividing line between academic researchers and lay contributors to their fields.


	
	Article available under CC BY license.
	
	License text: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode   
VL - 2021
IS - 20 (2021)
PY - 2021
SN - 2451-3202
C1 - 2543-702X
SP - 651
EP - 679
DO - 10.4467/2543702XSHS.21.019.14050
UR - https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/studia-historiae-scientiarum/article/scholarship-community-formation-and-book-reviews-the-literarisches-centralblatt-as-arena-and-meeting-place
KW - book reviews
KW - standards of scholarship
KW - scholarly character
KW - communities of scholarship
KW - late-nineteenth-century Germany
KW - Theodor Nöldeke
KW - Wilhelm Wundt
KW - Literarisches Centralblatt