In this paper I will argue not only that there is nothing new in the term "New Philology" (viz. Michele Barbi's Nuova filologia, Florence, 1938), but that the old philology was in fact a new philology (viz. the Neo-Grammarians) with respect to that which had preceded.' Use of the labels "new" and "old," applied to the dialectical development of a discipline, is a gesture sufficiently charged ideologically as to have little meaning in the absolute terms before and after, bad and good that it affixes. On the contrary, to the extent that calling oneself "new" is a value-laden gesture which implies that something else is "old" and therefore less worthy, it constitutes a rhetorical strategy of autolegitimation with little recognition, of course, that the process itself of declaring oneself "new" is indeed very old, or at least as old, where the present case is concerned, as Vico's Nuova Scienza, which some see as the beginning of philological science.2 The qualifier "new" is by definition a relational term. Vico conceived of his science as new with respect to the philosophy of Descartes; Meyer-Liibke and the Neo-Grammarians, with respect to the Romantics; the Italian New Philologists, with respect primarily to the textual methodology of Joseph Bedier. What, then, does the "New Philology" share with the "New Science"? In the name of what does the "New Philology," which is certainly an important element of the "New Medievalism" (but which is not to be confused with the "New Historicism"), proclaim its modernity? The new "New Philology" overlaps, but is not necessarily coterminous, with the original spirit of philology in that both presuppose: (1) the privileging of language over its referent in the production of meaning, which means that some attention is paid not only to what words mean but how they mean (and, concomitantly, that those who study the Middle Ages might finally join the mainstream of twentieth-century linguistic thought); (2) the contextualizing