CRANE— MEDI^.VAL SERAION-BOOKS AND STORIES. 387 



The popularity of the " Dialogus miraculorum," as I have re- 

 marked above, was enormous. Its stories were used with or with- 

 out credit in all subsequent treatises and collections. In the "Al- 

 phabet of Tales," which I shall mention again presently, 151 of the 

 801 stories are from Caesarius, and some of his tales have found 

 curious enough resting places, one (VIII., 59, see alsO' X., 2) has 

 been shown by P. Rajna in Romania, VI., 359, to be the probable 

 source of Boccaccio's fine story of Messer Torello and Saladin 

 ("Decameron," X., 9). 



In the list of his writings made by Caesarius himself (Schon- 

 bach, I., pp. 4-69; Meister, pp. xx-xxviii), he mentions under No. 

 27, " Item scripsi volumen diversarum visionum seu miraculorum 

 libros 8." This work was supposed to have been lost until Pro- 

 fessor Marx published in 1856 a fragment of the work containing 

 twenty-three miracles, afterwards reprinted by A. Kaufmann in an 

 appendix to his book on Caesarius. Later Dr. Aloys Meister dis- 

 covered two other fragments and published all three under the title 

 "Die Fragmente der Libri VIII Miraculorum des Caesarius von 

 Heisterbach " (in Romische Quartalschrift filr christliche Alfer- 

 thums-Kunde tind filr Kirchen-Gcschichte. Dreizehntcs Sitpple- 

 mcntheft. Rom, 1901). The fragments contain 191 miracles or 

 stories relating to the Sacrament and to the Virgin. They are of 



time the paths that Cxsarius's stories have trodden will have to be pointed 

 out. Of course one will not go so far as to confine the substance of a story 

 in the straight-jacket of a genealogy and try to trace the exact pedigree of 

 derivation and relation. A story grows and changes mostly through oral 

 tradition, the fixed written forms are often only chance resting stages in the 

 development; many connecting links of oral transformation have frequently 

 been lost between one fixed form and another. For these changes are not 

 logically necessary, but depend upon chances, it may be, that a locality or a 

 half forgotten historical fact caused assimilation, it may be, that a particular 

 object was connected with the transformation or merely the poetic impulse 

 to remolding brought about the change." This is also the conclusion of 

 Schonbach in his paper, " Die Legende vom Engel und Waldbruder " in 

 Sitcungsberichte der kais. Akad., CXLIIL, p. 62. The same writer in his 

 " Studien zur Erzahlungsliteratur, Achter Theil, IJber Caesarius von Heister- 

 bach," III., undertakes an interesting investigation of the changes which 

 stories undergo in passing from one author to another. He compares the 

 stories which are similar in Caesarius's " Dialogus " and " Homilies " and 

 the stories common to " Jacques de Vitry " and " fitienne de Bourbon," and 

 endeavors to formulate some general principles of transmission. 



