Abstract

Philology, as Stephen Nichols suggests in his introductory remarks, has come to be equated in the minds of many with a dessicated and dogmatic textual praxis which, through the minutious methodologies of paleography, historical grammar, and the textual criticism of “Monsieur Procuste, Philologue,” has reduced medieval literary “monuments” to the status of “documents.” The Oxford Roland, in my initial philological encounter with it, was alternately a subtext for deciphering sound laws or a node in a tree diagram mapping the scriptural genesis of a legend. And there it ended