The North American practice of material philology

This essay examines the origins, principles and recent developments in material philology as a branch of Romance philology, especially in the fields of Old Occitan, Old French and early Italian, in the United States. The study begins with a clarification of the distinctions between the short-lived ideology of New Philology and the long and continuing practice of material philology both as an interdisciplinary method and in its relationships a) with developments in Romance philology in France and Italy from the late 1960s to today and b) with significant advances in the fields of codicology and visual perception, the latter led by the work of experimental psychologists James Gibson and Irvin Rock. Considering a fusion of these advances, the essay concludes with brief examples of the application of material philology - particularly its use in isolating historical-critical accretions - in pivotal manuscripts of Dante's Vita nova, Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Guittone d'Arezzo's song cycle of the Trattato d'amore, and in the fusion of notarial and poetic writing systems in the Memoriali bolognesi.