Book Description

Excerpt from From St. Francis to Dante: Translations From the Chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene; 1221-1288 The present edition contains a considerable amount of fresh matter from Salimbene's chronicle, omitted from the first mainly for the insufficient reason that I had already published it elsewhere. The notes and appendices have been even more extended, especially on points where different critics seemed to think the evidence inadequate. Apart from the more obvious advantages of a second edition, an author must always welcome the further opportunity of explaining himself; especially when he has struck for a definite cause and provoked hard knocks in return. To most of my reviewers I owe hearty thanks, and certainly not least to a Guardian critic, whose evident disagreement with me on important points; did not prevent him from giving me credit for an honest attempt to describe the facts as they appeared to one pair of eyes. In that recognition an author finds his real reward: after all, even Goethe was content to say, "I can promise to be sincere, but not to be impartial." Genuine impartiality is one of the rarest of virtues, though there have always been plenty of authors who shirk thorny questions, or who concede points to the weaker side with the cheap generosity which impels a jury to find for a needy plaintiff against a rich man. Never, perhaps, was this kind of impartiality so common as at present, when (to quote a recent witty writer) "the fashion is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an agnostic conscience: you get the medieval picturesqueness of the one with the modem conveniences of the other." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.