andri Magni Regis Macedonum ad Magistrum suum Aristotilem'.
There are forty lines to a page and the writing tho' rather small is
easy to read.
The Worcester version omits eight of the tales found in the complete Mss. of the original Latin Disciplina (cf. Hilka & Söderhjelm op. cit.), but as noted above, there are three tales added at the end.[1]
The Middle English translation was carelessly made; there are numerous instances in which the translator seems to have been in a hurry, or ignorant of the Latin text he was following. Many of these crudities are pointed out in the footnotes of this edition. The stories, moreover, do not always follow the order they occupied in the original, and occasionally a passage has been taken out of its natural setting and connection in the Latin version by the translator (or perhaps by the copyist of the Worc. Cath. Ms.) and shifted to a different part of the collection. Indeed, the confusion about the meaning of the Latin and the arrangement of the materials often suggest the probability that we have to do with a careless copy of an earlier original. One might, to be sure, discover that many of these peculiarities have their basis in the Cambr. Univ. Libr. Ms. (li, vi, ii, ff. 95-116) of the Latin version, which, as we have already seen, is the source of the final three tales of our collection. Hilka and Söderhjelm, however, have not recorded many notable textual differences between this and the other complete manuscript versions—except the three spurious tales—either in their introductory discussions[2] or their foot notes.
- ↑ The missing tales are Nos. VII, VIII (cf. I, 13), XII (I, 16, 1. 9), XVIII (I, 20), XXI (I, 29), XXIX (I, 41), XXXI, XXXII (I, 43-44); the additions (Nos. XXVIIIXXX) seem to have corresponding originals in only one of the Latin Mss., viz, Cambridge Univ. Libr. li, 6, 11, ff., 113a-114 (see Hilka & Söderhjelm op. cit. I, Anhang II.) The identification of this Ms. and the definite determination of its relation to the Worc. Cath. Libr. Ms. F. 172, is only one of the many merits of this excellent edition of the Latin Disciplina Clericalis.
- ↑ Cf. op. cit. I, pp. xi, xvi, xix—where the editors remark: "C1 has the noteworthy assertion (I, i) that Petrus was the physician of Henry I, king of England" . . . . and "the copyist was in general fond of making additions." They also observe that the interpolation of the three spurious tales just after the closing words of the piece caused the shifting of exempla xx, xxii, xxiv from their natural positions in the collection to the end of this version—also pp. 68 and 72.
