"One of the multiple perspectives that Professor Menocal's book offers to the reader is to understand it as a genealogy of the discipline 'Romance Philosophy'. . . . Romance philology, for Menocal, is a late concretization of a century-long process of nostaglia: a nostalgia for a truly 'multicultural' world which constituted the 'Middle Ages' on the Iberian penisula and which ... Read morewas definitely destroyed, from 1492 on, by the Inquisition and the conquest of America as double departure towards European modernity. Menocal's genealogy of this nostalgia reveals an almost uncanny closeness between lyrical poetry and erudite discourses as the basis for academic medievalism."—Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University "This is a brilliant book, exhibiting far-ranging comparativist expertise, from Medieval Arabic, Hebrew, and Provençal lyric poetry, Dante and Petrarch, through the scholarly paladins of Romance philology and the Parry-Lordian theory of oral composition, up to modern rock music and its lyrics. . . . A pathfinding book."—Samuel G. Armistead, University of California, Davis Show Less