After considering the parlous state and status of Romance Philology, paleography, and codicology in North America and different European countries, this article makes a renewed plea for the study of medieval French literature in its manuscript context. It then looks at the reception of Keith Busby’s Codex and Context by examining reviews in scholarly journals and its place in current scholarly debates. Suggestions are them made for ways in which the generally synchronic studies produced to date may be transformed diachronically so as to contribute to a “philology of reception”.