Book Description

When this work was undertaken in 1886, I hoped to be able to put upon the title-page “edited for the first time.” I then knew of only a few exempla which had been printed by Lecoy de la Marche in his edition of Étienne de Bourbon, and by others as illustrative material to Molière, etc. I very soon, however, discovered that the selection of Latin stories edited by Mr. T. Wright for the Percy Society (Vol. VIII., 1842) contained a considerable number of Jacques de Vitry’s exempla, although the name of the author was not mentioned. After the present work, with the exception of the Introduction, was in the hands of the printer, and the text partly in type, I received Cardinal Pitra’s Analecta Novissima Spicilegii Solesmensis (Altera continuatio, Tom. II., 1888), containing selections from Jacques de Vitry’s Sermones Vulgares, and pp. 443–461, from a MS. in the Vatican library, a Speculum Exemplorum, or collection of exempla from these sermons. Aeterna Press