In the following excerpt, originally published in 1824, Swan, the first translator of the complete Gesta Romanorum into English, offers a brief history of the work.
I now hasten to the Gesta Romano...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Mosher discusses the Gesta Romanorum in the context of preceding and succeeding collections of moralized stories.
[The] collection of fables and tales by the English preac...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Weld accounts for the disjunction between the written tales in the Gesta Romanorum and their oral versions.
The Gesta Romanorum, a collection of allegorized stories compil...
Read more
In the following essay, Marchalonis argues that symbolism in the Gesta Romanorum stories is externally imposed rather than internally developed.
Since the theories of D. W. Robertson, Jr., were fir...
Read more
In the following essay, Lyall argues that the fifteenth-century Scots poem The Thre Prestis of Peblis, was not influenced by the Gesta Romanorum, as crtiics who interpret it as a harbinger of humanism...
Read more
In the following review, Jackson summarizes some of the major ideas in Weiske's study of the Gesta Romanorum.
In the Gesta Romanorum we have the most popular collection of exempla to have be...
Read more
In the following essay, Hope examines the French translation of an assortment of tales from the Gesta Romanorum.
The Gesta Romanorum is an anonymous collection of moralized tales in the exemplum tr...
Read more
In the following essay, Speed catalogs a series of motifs that appear both in the stories of the Gesta Romanorum and in medieval romances.
I Introduction
Amongst scholarly efforts to locate both in...
Read more
In the following essay, Mabillard explores Shakespeare's use of the Gesta Romanorum as the basis of the three caskets motif in The Merchant of Venice.
There are many possible texts that Shak...
Read more
In the following essay, Johnson shows how Chaucer scholar W. W. Skeat used a tale from the Gesta Romanorum as the basis for an additional tale he composed for The Canterbury Tales.
All Chaucerians ...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Hooper discusses the textual history of the Gesta Romanorum.
It is somewhat remarkable that, in spite of the great interest attaching to the Gesta Romanorum, as the most p...
Read more
In the following essay, Schwarz argues that Renaissance dramatist John Fletcher used episodes from the Gesta Romanorum in several plays he helped to write.
Some years ago I pointed out (Mod. Lang. ...
Read more
In the essay below, Bourne examines the themes and sources of a number of tales in the Gesta Romanorum.
The popularity of the Gesta Romanorum during the Middle Ages is abundantly shown by the enorm...
Read more
In the following essay, Miller surveys the characteristics, sources, and influences of the Gesta Romanorum.
1. Manuscripts and Early Printed Editions
The Gesta Romanorum was one of the most popular...
Read more
In the following essay, Trienens traces the relationship of the cloud-shaped whale—which Hamlet points out to Polonius– in Hamlet to the Gesta Romanorum's depiction of the whale a...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Smalley argues that many of the entries in the Gesta Romanorum were derived from a book of exempla for sermons by the fourteenth-century preacher and teacher Robert Holcot.
...
Read more
In the following essay, Maurer examines how William Morris used tales from the Gesta Romanorum in his The Earthly Paradise.
“When you are using an old story,” Morris once observed, &#...
Read more
In the following essay, Kahrl links sixteenth-century jest-books to the Gesta Romanorum, comparing the tales and exempla appearing in those books with tales in the Gesta Romanorum and similar collecti...
Read more
Critical Essay by Charles Swan
