The development and spread of comparative philology cannot be confined to the purely internal history of its technical advances as a discipline. That story is reprised in this talk in order to highlight some neglected points of resistance to it, with particular reference to Michel Bréal, one of the heroes of the philological resistance movement.

Christopher Prendergast
Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; Fellow of the British Academy; author ofMirages and Mad Beliefs. Proust the Skeptic (Princeton, 2013) and A History of Modern French Literature, 1500-2000 (Princeton, forthcoming)

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