1. Introduction

2. Making language safe for science and society: from Francis Bacon to John Lock

3. Antiquaries and philologists: the construction of modernity and its others in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England

4. The critical foundations of national epic: Hugh Blair, the Ossian controversy, and the rhetoric of authenticity

5. Johann Gottfried Herder: language reform, das Volk, and the patriarchal state in eighteenth-century Germany

6. The Brothers Grimm: scientizing, textual production in the service of romantic nationalism

7. Henry Rowe school craft and the making of an American textual tradition

8. The foundation of all future researches: Franz Boas, George Hunt, Native American texts and the construction of modernity

9. Conclusion.