There has been a good deal of stimulating discussion lately about philology and its rightful place in literary studies. Some of the participants in this discussion have expressed a desire for a recuperated philology, one informed by recent work in linguistics, anthropology, and literary theory. Others are suspicious of what they see as a return to an especially sterile brand of formalism. Still others write about philology as if it were an aged and distant relative, perhaps a great uncle from the old country: he deserves our respect, certainly, and perhaps some affection, but his fussiness is tiresome and his politics hopelessly reactionary. Taken together, these views suggest a picture of what philology used to be, and, at least in the first case, what it might be in the future. This picture is in some ways misleading, though, and in this article I would like first to review it and then to suggest another way of understanding both what happened to the old philology and what a new one can do for literary studies today. The discussion I have in mind began with the January 1990 issue of Speculum, which was devoted to exploring various aspects of "the New Philology." One of the articles in this issue, written by Suzanne Fleischman, suggests some directions of research which might revitalize philology in general, and linguistic analyses of medieval vernacular texts in particular.1 Fleischman maintains that some of the more idiosyncratic properties of these texts-for example, the seemingly random use of tense in Old French poetry-are best understood first by recognizing them as vestiges of oral performance, and then by relating them to similar features of our own conversational narratives. She strongly suggests that any new philology should take account of recent