The academic discipline of Comparative Literature originated in the 19th century alongside other new fields such as Comparative Law or Comparative Philology. The aim of those disciplines was to find what was common to different legal systems, different languages or, in the case of Comparative Literature, different literatures. The origin of the term has been debated, but its first steps were taken, undoubtedly, in France. The first record of the term is to be found in the volume Cours de littérature comparée, which brought together several texts published in 1816 by Jean-François-Michel Noël, but it bore little resemblance to what Comparative Literature would become. The pioneers in the field were Abel-François Villemain, Philarète Chasles and Jean-Jacques Ampère. Comparative Literature was established as a field of study with the contributions of Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve, who used the term in a conference in 1868, even though previously, in 1840, he had already talked about “compared literary history.” The first specialised journal on the topic was published in Cluj, Romania, in 1877, and was run by Hugo Meltzl. The title appeared in several languages, with the meaning 'comparative literature journal'. In 1879, it became Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum. The term in English was made popular by Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett in a work published in 1886, precisely under the name Comparative Literature.