Surprised by Edward Said’s definition of “Romance philology”: “[T]he study of those literatures deriving from Latin but ideologically unintelligible without the Christian doctrine of Incarnation (and hence of the Roman Church) as well as its secular underpinning in the Holy Roman Empire.”
(Said’s introduction to the reissue of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (Princeton, 2003), p. xi.)
D. L. Dusenbury 