GESTA ROMANORUM: OR, ENTERTAINING MORAL STORIES; INVENTED BY THE MONKS AS A FIRESIDE RECREATION, AND COMMONLY APPLIED IN OF OUR OWN POETS AND OTHERS. FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES, HAVE EXTRACTED THEIR PLOTS. TRANSLATED FROM THE LATIN, WITH PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS AND COPIOUS NOTES, BY THE REV. CHARLES SWAN. REVISED AND CORRECTED BY WYNNARD HOOPER, M.A., Clare College, Cambridge. They" [the Monks] "might be disposed occasionally to recreate their LONDON: GEORGE BELL & SONS, YORK ST., COVENT GARDEN, AND NEW YORK. 1891. PREFACE. 1 Ir is somewhat remarkable that, in spite of the great interest attaching to the Gesta Romanorum, as the most popular story book of the Middle Ages, and as the source of much literature in that and later times, no English version of it should have appeared until 1824, when a translation was published in two volumes by the Rev. C. Swan. Mr. Swan, though his translation was in many respects faulty, kept to the original with tolerable fidelity, and only deliberately tampered with the text once; namely, in altering the termination of Tale XXVIII., because he considered that the story, as it stood, did not afford a good "moral." He very often paraphrased; and where the Latin contained too bald a statement of facts, he considered himself justified in amplifying the narrative. But this can hardly be objected to. The stories are often told so carelessly that a translator is bound to add something in his rendering to make them express what they were intended to convey to the reader. An English version of a work like the Gesta Romanorum should certainly not be a literal translation. The present edition is a reprint of Mr. Swan's, with considerable corrections and alterations. Whenever Mr. Swan only expanded the Latin in his translation so as to express what was really implied in the original, I have left his rendering untouched. But I have expunged whatever a 3 was an unnecessary departure from the text. On the other hand, Mr. Swan had occasionally omitted sentences of importance; these have been restored to the text in the present edition. Mistakes in translation, of which there are more than might have been expected, have, of course, been corrected. Mr. Swan's notes are sometimes erroneous and occasionally pointless. With regard to the former class, I have generally allowed them to stand, and added a correction of the mistakes. Notes of the latter class I have sometimes omitted, and those so treated will not, I think, be missed by the reader. The most valuable part of Mr. Swan's notes are his quotations from other authors illustrative of the text, in selecting which he showed more judgment than in the actual work of translation; but it is throughout evident that his knowledge of English literature, or, at all events, of writers about English literature, was greater than his acquaintance with either Latin or Greek. A great deal has been done, since Mr. Swan wrote, towards settling the vexed questions relative to the genesis of the Gesta. Sir Frederick Madden, in his work on the old English versions of the Gesta, did a good deal towards solving the problem. But the book which has dealt with the subject in the most thorough and satisfactory manner is the work of a painstaking German, Herr Hermann Oesterley.* It is little known in England. The British Museum only possesses the first part; the authorities apparently not thinking it worth while to obtain the remainder, when it was not spontaneously offered them by the bookseller, perhaps because no one ever asked for the work. The leaves of the first part were not even cut till recently. Considering the value of Herr Oesterley's book, its absence, except in an incomplete state, from the shelves * Gesta Romanorum, von H. Oesterley. Berlin, 1872. |