Ifwe acknowledge that Romance Philology emerged as a discipline during the nineteenth century -the century of Herder's Romantic nationalism, of Hegel's ideological historiography, and of orientalist discourses ofdebased or exoticized alteriLy in the works offoundational Indo-European philologisls like Sir William Jones- how does one conlinue Lo leach or wrile a history of the language without perpetuating such discourses, especially nowwhen these linear master narratives have supposedly become discrediled?1 As a polenliai solution, perhaps we should lake heed ofMaria Rosa Menocal's observations in the light of her reading of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's history of both the Romance and national philological traditions. Menocal suggests that, far from being a nationalist or imperialist discipline, Romance Philology might be better understood as the discipline of the outsider, of the exile, entranced "with the fragmentation, the loveliness and merits of the scattering of the long- lost empire" (109). Founded in Germany by Friedrich Diez, a Prussian, and hence a non-native Romance speaker, at a time when Germany did not even yet exist as a nation, Diez dwelt on Provencal poetry in languedoc and therefore on a language notcorrelated with any national boundaries, and in fact a tongue destined for destruction to allow for the emergence ofFrance as a linguistically unified polity. According to Menocal, if later nationalistic philological institutions of individual