372 CRANE— MEDIEVAL SERMON-BOOKS AND STORIES. 



stories translated into the various languages of Europe where they 

 enjoyed extraordinary popularity during the middle ages. It was 

 admitted that these tales were also introduced into Europe by oral 

 transmission on the part of travellers, and later by those engaged in 

 the Crusades. 



The earliest mention of a peculiar means of oral transmission, 

 that of preachers in their sermons, was made by Thomas Wright 

 (1810-1877), the distinguished English antiquarian, in the introauc- 

 tion to his " Selection of Latin Stories from Manuscripts of the Thir- 

 teenth and Fourteenth Centuries," Percy Society, Vol. VIII., London, 

 1842. The collection contains 149 tales from various MSS. in the 

 British Museum. Of these the editor says in his Introduction, p. vi, 

 "No manuscripts are of more frequent occurrence than collections of 

 tales like those printed in the present volume ; and we owe their 

 preservation in this form to a custom which drew upon the monks 

 the ridicule of the early reformers. The preachers of the thirteenth, 

 fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries attempted to illustrate their texts, 

 and to inculcate their docrines, by fables and stories, which they 

 moralized generally by attaching to them mystical significations. 

 These illustrations they collected from every source which presented 

 itself, the more popular the better, because they more easily attracted 

 the attention of people accustomed to hear them. Sometimes they 

 moralized the jests and satirical anecdotes current among the people 

 — sometimes they adopted the fabliaux and metrical pieces of the 

 jongleurs, or minstrels — and not infrequently they abridged the 

 plots of more extensive romances. Each preacher made collections 

 for his own use — he set down in Latin the stories which he gath- 

 ered from the mouths of his acquaintance, selected from the collec- 

 tions which had already been made by others, or turned into Latin, 

 tales which he found in a dififerent dress. ... I am inclined to 

 think that the period at which these collections began to be made 

 was the earlier part of the thirteenth century, and that to that cen- 

 tviry we owe the compilation in Latin of most of these tales, though 

 the greater nun±)er of manuscripts may be ascribed to the four- 

 teenth." 



Wright mentions John of Bromyard and the " Promptuarium 

 Exemplorum" and dwells on the importance of these tales for the 



