From 1477 when Caxton, in his little Westminster shop, published the first book printed in England, the history of English book production is richly documented. Even before the invention of printing, the story of monastic books, in England and elsewhere, can be fairly well traced. A good deal is now known about the output of medieval university books. But there is a notable gap, even in our theorizing, about the early production of vernacular works in England, especially about the very large amount of secular verse that was composed before 1350 by anonymous authors. We know practically nothing about either the authors or the transcribers of those works, or about the circumstances under which manuscripts of contemporary date were compiled.

The Gesta Danorum of the twelfth-century Danish historian, Saxo Grammaticus, might fairly be expected to include stories corresponding, more or less, to those episodes of Beowulf the scene of which was the Danish court; in point of fact the Ingeld episode, at least, was known to Saxo, who gives us two versions of it, differing widely, it is true, from each other and from the English version, but demonstrably the same story in origin nevertheless. When however we turn to the chief adventure of Beowulf at the Danish court, the fight with Grendel (and that with Grendel's dam), the Saxonian parallel usually pointed out strikes one as extraordinarily far-fetched. I refer to Biarco's fight with the bear, an episode which Saxo disposes of in the following words:

Talibus operum meritis exsultanti novam de se silvestris fera victoriam prsebuit. Ursum quippe eximiae magnitudinis obvium sibi inter dumeta factum iaculo confecit comitemque suum Hialtonem, quo viribus maior evaderet, applicato ore egestum beluse cruorem haurire iussit. Creditum namque erat hoc potionis genere corporei roboris incrementa præstari.

Certain writings of antiquity, certain documents of early Celtic ecclesiastical history, and certain of the oldest Irish sagas reveal that the composition of poetry was practiced by the Irish pagans. The stylistic character of the pagan poetry has been rather generally ignored. Not that there is an abundance of specimens incontestably pagan in provenance; nevertheless, a number of poems have survived from Irish paganism, and though few are sufficient to establish the character of at least one style of pagan Irish verse.

Comparisons between Chrétien de Troyes' Erec et Enide, composed about 1160, and Hartmann von Aue's Êrec der Wunderaere, written soon after 1190, began in 1862 with Karl Bartsch's article, a few years after both romances had been made easily accessible in I. Bekker's edition of Chrétien's Erec (1856) and Moritz Haupt's edition of Hartmann's Erec (1839). Bartsch's pioneer work consists, however, mainly in paralleling the texts to show the more or less similar sequence of events.

A New study of the life of Robert Mannyng of Brunne finds its justification in the belief that one of Chaucer's most interesting predecessors in the art of story telling deserves to be better known than he is. Since all accounts of the life of Robert Mannyng are based upon his own statements about himself, the present attempt at a reinterpretation may be clarified by quoting the pertinent passages to begin with.

MSS CCCC 190 and 265, Bodley 718 (2632), Junius 121 (5232), Nero A 1, and Bibl. Paris MS Fonds Latin 3182, all from the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century, contain a great many common entries relating to the affairs of a bishop and have been studied with some care by several scholars. Miss Mary Bateson nearly fifty years ago made it clear that the theological and legal material in these MSS really constituted a sort of bishop's commonplace book, and she identified a number of the random excerpts found here in such bewildering confusion. It is my purpose to present some evidence that Archbishop Wulfstan early in his episcopacy at Worcester made extensive use of the material collected here and perhaps directed its assembling as a part of his attempt to regulate the practices of both bishops and lesser clergy under his supervision. To the list given above must be added two other MSS which contain the same excerpts in somewhat the same order—Copenhagen Royal Library Gl. Kgl. 1595, and Bodleian Barlow 37. It is extremely difficult, if not now impossible, to fix the relationship among these MSS, but it is generally agreed that they represent a collection made at Worcester early in the eleventh century, and in the following discussion I shall deal with what must have been the original collection rather than with the contents of any particular MS.

Among the treasures in the Henry E. Huntington Library is a copy of Robert de Gretham's Le miroir, ou les évangiles des domnées, which has some importance for the Anglo-Norman original, and more for the relationship of the Miroir to the Middle English translation, known as the Mirrur. The manuscript (now HM 903) has been known for some time, but it was not listed by Vising or Russell nor employed by Miss Aitken in her extracts from the Miroir. It is bound with a copy of the Manuel des Pechiez, so that it occupies folios 68-205 of the present manuscript book. The copy is fragmentary at the beginning and accordingly was misbound, with a rubric and an illumination at the top of what appeared to be the first folio; the proper sequence of folios is 140-205, 68-139.

Scholars are now fairly well agreed that the Latin preposition ab, far from dying out, has remained extremely active in France and that the French à, when denoting separation, origin, causation, manner, means, agent, and accompaniment, is its direct descendant. And yet the theory still persists that in Italy this same preposition disappeared completely in the eighth century after the emergence of da and that the Italian a, regardless of its meaning, always corresponds to Latin ad. E. Richter believed that the use of a in stereotyped phrases like a destra, a malizia, a causa, a bello studio, etc., was borrowed from French or Provençal and that modal a (stare a testa china) and instrumental a (pregare a mani giunte) descended from Latin ad. As Muller says nothing about a, I take it that he, too, sees in it only a representative of ad. Likewise Graur, after stating that apud and ab have not survived in Italian, declares that it is a<ad which, besides denoting locality, introduces the instrument and agent.

Commentators on the text of the Canterbury Tales have hitherto proceeded very largely on the basis of personal preferences, comparing the manuscript readings and accepting those which commended themselves to the judgment of the critic, and rejecting the others as due to perversions or carelessness on the part of the scribes. Obviously this method of determining the text represented an eclectic rather than a scientific process.

Let us suppose that an irate wife complains to her husband: “We used to live like love-birds; now you act as if you were loony; and when I tell you that your behavior is as rude as that of a savage, you respond by roaring like a lion and repeating parrot-like everything your brother says about your being henpecked.” Let us suppose, moreover, that she repeats this indictment over a number of years, in a series of letters to her sympathetic relatives and friends. A commentator on these letters might be tempted to conclude that the lady was fairly familiar with Africa (probably had even been big-game hunting and clearly had been more impressed by the fauna than the flora), that she was aware of and concurred in medieval notions concerning the effect of the moon on the mind, and, finally, that she must have lived for some time on a chicken farm.

The present essay embodies a continuation of some previously published studies of the Middle English Seege (or Batayle) of Troye; it is therefore hardly necessary or advisable to present here a full summary of the large body of scholarly comment which this poem has aroused. Briefly, it has been established that the Seege of Troye is dependent on two principal sources: De Excidio Troiae of Dares Phrygius and the Roman de Troie of Benoit de Sainte-Maure; and that details from these two accounts are pretty thoroughly blended together in the English poem. There have been noted, however, a number of episodes—mostly concerned with the early lives of Paris and Achilles—which are not traceable either to Dares or to Benoit. At least one other source of some kind has therefore been regarded as a necessary postulate in order to account for the presence of these episodes in the Seege of Troye.

The Dantean formulas with desiderative se have recently attracted the attention of several reputable scholars and have given occasion to a lively discussion. Nicholson in Romania, LXI (1935), 3 ff., proposed to abandon the traditional etymology Ital. sẹt<Lat. sī, and suggested Ital. sẹt < Lat. sǐt. Among those who accepted Mr. Nicholson's conclusion are: E. C. Armstrong, MLN., LI, 68; K. McKenzie, Italica, XIII, 70, who closely examined the passages of Dante, and finally Miss Lograsso, Italica, XV, 152. He was strongly opposed, on the other hand, by E. B. Place, Hisp. Rev., V, (1937), 259, to whom he replied in the same journal, VI, 250 ff., and finally by L. Spitzer, Romania, LXV (1939), 290 ff., who defended the old etymology Ital. sẹt < Lat. sī. Having read the arguments of both camps, and having arrived at the conclusion that this usage of Dantean sẹt cannot be explained either by Lat. sǐ or by s࿐t, I venture to express my opinion on the subject.