Romance studies encompass within their remit all the Latin-descended (or Romance) languages: Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, as well as Occitan and Catalan.

Romance philology started to develop into a scholarly discipline in Prussia by the 1830s, several decades before its academic establishment in France, Italy and Spain. The discipline was the result of the efforts of François-Marie-Just Raynouard, Friedrich Diez and Gaston Paris.

Germany

The elaboration of an Indo-European language tree, initially consolidated by Franz Bopp’s Über das Konjugationssystem of Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit der jenem griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (Frankfurt 1816), mobilized the historical-comparatist interest of linguists and philologists. Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (1819-37) applied this linguistic comparatism to the Germanic languages, and was followed by similar studies on the comparative grammar of the Romance (Friedrich Christian Diez, 1836-44), the Slavic (Franc Miklošič, 1852-74) and the Celtic languages (Johann Caspar Zeuss, 1853).

Friedrich Christian Diez (1794-1876) approached Provençal literature at the suggestion of Goethe, who had read Raynouard’s works on the troubadours’ literature and language (on which, see below). From 1830 onwards, he held the first chair of Romance philology in Bonn. His early books on the subject were devoted to ancient Provençal, whilst later in life, he concentrated almost exclusively on linguistic studies. His purpose was to write the history of the Romance languages following the example of Jacob Grimm and his historical method. His Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen (3 vols, 1836-44) laid down the foundations of the historical and comparative grammar of the Neo-Latin (or Romance) languages, accompanied by the Etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Sprachen (1853). For Diez, the unity of the Neo-Latin linguistic world could be fully demonstrated. Diez’s work was a benchmark for many later philologists, witness Charles Grandgagnage’s work on Walloon (Dictionnaire de la langue wallonne, 1850; in return Diez dedicated his Altromanische Glossare of 1865 to Grandgagnage).

France

In France at the time, Romance studies focused on written remains – the “monuments” of the language – thus nurturing an antiquarian-philological interest for languages from the past. The Provençal scholar François-Marie-Just Raynouard (1761-1836) is generally considered as the progenitor of Romance studies in France, before their institutionalization by Diez. In his study of the origins of the ancient troubadours’ language, Raynouard accorded Provençal a special seniority in the formation of other Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese). August Wilhelm Schlegel refuted this in his Observations sur la langue et la littérature provençales (1818), disapproving in particular of the choice of the overly vague term “Romance”, and controverting Raynouard’s claim that this “Romance language” was an intermediate evolutionary stage between Latin and the modern languages that descended from it. Nonetheless, Raynouard continued to enjoy prestige as the first to attempt to establish a relationship between the various Romance languages and to put them in a historical filiation. French resistance against the scholarly hegemony of German philologists also played its role in these debates; in any case, the result was that Provençal was to enjoy a special place in Romance studies in France.

The critic and philologist Claude Fauriel, having earned a chair in foreign literature at the Faculty of Arts in Paris in 1830, devoted his lecture series there to Provençal poetry. In his view, ancient Provençal literature had provided a literary foundation for all the subsequent western European literatures. Moreover, he was one of the first scholars to denounce the “monstrous Albigensian war” as the cause of the devastation and extinction of the Midi civilization and culture. Consequently, he felt that Provençal literature should be the subject of a scholarly reconstruction, much like Sanskrit; he expressed these views in his posthumous Histoire de la poésie provençale (1846) and Dante et les origines de la langue et de la littérature italiennes (1854).

In 1869, in Montpellier, the Société pour l’Étude des Langues Romanes (SLR) was created with the aim of studying ancient and modern Romance in the south of France. It was aligned with the historical-comparative studies inaugurated in France by Raynouard, and was stimulated by the revival of Provençal literature and the development of Catalan letters. The creation of the SLR demonstrates the commitment of its founders to giving French Romance philology a scientific status and to following the international standards adopted by the discipline elsewhere, notably in Germany. The Société published a periodical as of 1870, the Revue des Langues Romanes, the first French periodical entirely devoted to Romance philology (ancient texts as well as dialect research).

Romance studies in France changed when in 1872 Romania, a quarterly periodical consecrated to the study of Romance languages and literature, was founded. Its founding editors, Gaston Paris (1839–1903) and Paul Meyer (1840–1917), had both been formed by their training at the École Nationale des Chartes and by the influence of Friedrich Diez (Paris was one of his disciples in Bonn). They closely associated textual scholarship with the literary-historical study of medieval France. Romania followed the creation of the Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature (1866), whose policy of judging the contemporary works from a strictly scientific point of view followed the severe factualism then in vogue in German and English academic periodicals. Unlike the Revue des Langues Romanes, principally devoted to the phonetics and dialectology of the spoken Romance languages, Romania specialized in the study of Old French language and literature. In accordance with its founders’ aims, Romania sought to set out the principles of the new discipline, censuring theoretical and methodological shortcomings through severe reviews. The creation of Romania is part of the history of professionalization of linguistic research in France, and also marked a move towards the final institutionalization of Romance philology, now seeking scientific status and a national scope. The national inspiration behind Romania shows how French philologists attempted to wrest control of the field of Romance philology from Germany, and how the main focus shifted away from Provence. This appropriation of Romance studies by Paris-centred academics relegated the langue d’oc from its earlier primacy to a marginal position.

This move was altogether in line with the strong language centralism and state dirigism which had characterized French developments from the establishment of the Académie française onwards. French had been officially codified since classicist times, with few changes in orthogaphical or other rules since 1762 (the 6th edition of the Académie’s dictionary, 1835, introducing some rationalizations already advocated by Voltaire). Royal absolutism had already attempted to streamline the realm’s linguistic diversity in the Ancien Régime (e.g., after the annexation of the Roussillon); but it was mainly after the declaration of the people’s republican sovereignty in 1792 that a France calling itself une et indivisible developed an official policy against linguistic diversity within its borders. Official measures and educational policies to discourage the use of minority languages and dialects have remained in force ever since, often polarizing the relationship with cultural activists from the non-French-speaking parts of France: Brittany, the Basque Country, French Flanders, Alsace. The use of French outside the state’s borders has been an enshrined aim in French cultural diplomacy since the late 19th century, manifested in the foundation of the Alliance française in 1883 by a government official with the symbolic support of such leading personalities as Ferdinand de Lesseps, Louis Pasteur, Ernest Renan and Jules Verne.

Italy

In Italy, Romance studies began to take shape in the early 1870s with the creation of two periodicals: the Rivista di Filologia romanza (1872), directed by Luigi Manzoni, Ernesto Monaci (who taught Romance languages and literature at the University of Rome from 1875) and Edmund Stengel, and the Archivio glottologico italiano, created by Graziadio Isaia Ascoli in 1873. The former was devoted to Romance languages and literature, whilst the periodical directed by Ascoli dealt with the study of Italian dialects. Ascoli (1829–1907), born in Habsburg-ruled Gorizia, was Professor of Comparative Grammar and Oriental languages at the Accademia scientifico-letteraria (“Scientific and Literary Academy”) of Milan; his interest in ancient (Indo-European and Semitic) languages also involved an interest in the language of the Roma (“Gypsies”): witness his article Studi âriosemitici (1865) and his Zigeunerisches (1865) besides his Lezioni di fonologia comparata del sanscrito, del greco e del latino (1870). In the 1870s, his attention turned to Romance linguistics, and especially to the study of Italian dialects, to which he applied German-philological methods of data gathering and analysis; this was what led him to found the Archivio glottologico italiano; its initial 1873 volume was dedicated to Friedrich Diez. In 1875, on the occasion of the first philological and literary contest organized by the Société pour l’Étude des Langues Romanes in Montpellier, Ascoli was awarded the first prize for his work on Franco-Provençal.

Other philologists who contributed to the development of Romance studies in Italy included Mussafia, Canello and Rajna. Adolfo Mussafia (1835–1905), born in Spalato (now Split, Dalmatia), and founder of the chair of Romance philology at the University of Vienna, from the beginning of his academic career devoted himself to Dante. He was also involved in the debate on the orthography of the Romanian language, in a period when language and national issues were closely intertwined in that newly independent country.

Ugo Angelo Canello (1848–1883), born in Habsburg-ruled Guia (Veneto), attended Diez’s courses in Bonn thanks to an Austrian scholarship. His scholarly debut was devoted to illustrating the relevance of Diez’s research. In 1872, he started teaching a course on Romance philology at the University of Padua. After having taught German language and literature at Milan’s Accademia scientifico-letteraria of Milan from 1874 to 1876, and comparative history of Romance literature at the University of Padua, in 1882 he was appointed professor of the history of Romance literature at the same university. In the following year, Canello was awarded the international prize of the Société pour l’Étude des Langues Romanes of Montpellier for his work on the 12th-century troubadour Arnaut Daniel.

Pio Rajna (1847–1930) was the first incumbent, through the intercession of Ascoli, of the chair of Romance literature at the Milanese Accademia scientifico-letteraria (1874). He became the most celebrated proponent of the historical-comparatist trend in Italian philology through such fundamental works as Le fonti dell’Orlando Furioso (1876), Le origini dell’epopea francese (“The origins of the French epic”, 1884) and the critical edition of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (1896).

Language had a direct political relevance in Italy since the new state, which came into being during and following the Risorgimento, required linguistic as much as political unification. (The story of Manzoni re-writing I promessi sposi from its original regional-Lombardic idiom into standard “Florentine” is well known.) The official, Dante-derived norm for Italian was laid down in the fifth edition of the Vocabolario of the Accademia della Crusca; the first Vocabolario of this Florentine city academy, dedicated to language purification on the example of Dante’s usage, dates back to the 16th century and had inspired Richelieu’s project to have an official dictionary for the French language, to be prepared by the Académie française. On re-founding the Accademia della Crusca in his Tuscan territories (it had been abolished in 1783), Napoleon had in 1811 commissioned it to prepare a similar standard dictionary. This new (fifth) edition was many years in the making; when the initial volume appeared, in 1863, its dedication (to King Victor Emmanuel II) and its preface were imbued with the Risorgimento spirit of Italian nationalism and the need to have a purified national standard language.

Spain

In Spain, where the standard orthography had been fixed in the course of the 18th century by a Royal Academy (founded on the French model in 1713), historical-comparative linguistics was introduced by the late 1860s. The pioneering scholar in this field was the Catalan philologist Manuel Milà i Fontanals (1818–1884); he studied, in particular, the origins of Romance languages and their relationship, including that between Catalan and Occitan, and he focused on the study and classification of the Catalan dialects. In 1845, he was appointed professor of general and Spanish literature at the University of Barcelona. A correspondent member of the Société pour l’Étude des Langues Romanes of Montpellier, Milà i Fontanals maintained relations with Romance scholars from France, Germany and Italy. He published a number of works on Catalan popular poetry (Observacions sobre la poesía popular, 1853, and Romancerillo Catalán, 1853 and 1882) and on an ancient Castilian epic (De la poesia heroico-popular castellana, 1874). His work on troubadour poetry (De los trovadores en España, 1861) attempted to retrace the history of the Provençal influence on the three literatures of the Iberian peninsula: Catalan, Castilian and Portuguese. Much of Milà’s work was published by his pupil Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo as Obras completas (8 vols, 1888-96).

Following the works of Milà i Fontanals and Menéndez y Pelayo, Romance philology was belatedly incorporated as a discipline in the academic world only in the early 20th century, around the towering figure of Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869–1968), professor of Romance philology at the University of Madrid (1899), foreign member of the Accademia dei Lincei from 1914, founder of the Revista de filología española the same year, and the author of numerous works dedicated to Spanish language and literature: Manual de gramática histórica española (1904), Documentos lingüísticos de España (1919), Orígenes del Español (1926), En torno a la lengua vasca (1962); but also La leyenda de los Infantes de Lara (1896), El cantar de mío Cid (3 vols, 1908-12), L’épopée castillane à travers la littérature espagnole (1910), La España del Cid (2 vols, 1929), Romancero hispánico (2 vols, 1953).