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There seems to be a return to Romance philology in Anglophone scholarship. When the study of the medieval forms of modern foreign languages began in the United Kingdom about a century ago, the Romance languages taught at the University of Cambridge were French, Italian and Provençal; the same trio was honored in Oxford and London; at Manchester and other provincial universities, Provençal was less prominent than Anglo-Norman; but from about the 1970s, philological work in all these areas declined, and there was a turn in favor of literary, theoretical and cultural research. The Romanic Review has always been hospitable to medieval French and Provençal or, as I call it, Occitan studies, but its publications in these fields as far back as I can remember reflect this literary or cultural emphasis; indeed, it was the leading journal of this new disciplinary turn.1 In recent years, under the influence of postcolonial and translation theory, Anglophone critics of medieval French and Occitan have increasingly become interested in what I would see as the core concern of Romance philology: not just the development of the individual Romance languages but the relations between them and the movement of texts in these in-between zones. Thus there is an altogether new interest in Franco-Italian, in "the French of England," and in the troubadour diaspora after the Albigensian Crusade. Renewed attention to the interactions between Anglo-Norman, French, Occitan, and Italian - medieval languages that were traditionally strong in the Anglophone academy - has also stimulated interest in Catalan as a conduit of mobility around the northern Mediterranean.2
My own recent work on the reception of troubadour poetry reflects this Romance philological turn and, in a discussion directed largely to the past of the Romanic Review, I offer this essay as an indication of the kind of submissions it may receive in the future. In northern France and in Germany, troubadour song was imitated and assimilated by poets in their own languages, giving rise to important native traditions. But in what are now Spain and Italy, where many of the troubadours resettled after the Albigensian disaster, rather than this "nightingales' way" of lyric re-creation, poets often composed in Occitan rather than in their own languages. And in Spain, Italy, and the Occitan homeland in...