SOURCE: Hope, Geoffrey R. “Tales of Literacy and Authority in the Violier (1521): The French Gesta Romanorum.” Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance LIX, no. 2 (1997): 353-63.

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 tradition identified with Franciscan and Benedictine preaching orders in England and southern Germany¹. It reached a wide European readership in a great many manuscripts mostly in Latin that begin around the early 14th century². The first imprints from Utrecht (1472) and Cologne (1473) continue its popularity and have the effect of stabilizing manuscript traditions, establishing what Oesterley calls the Vulgärtext: 181 stories in sequence. Welter indicates (273-4) that it was, after the Legenda Aurea, the second most popular book of the late Middle Ages. Goldschmidt calls it simply «the best known storybook of the Middle...