David R. Winter, The Llanthony Stories: A Translation of the Narrationes aliquot fabulosae. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2021, x, 173 pp.

Abstract

Abstract: This slim volume provides a single-text Latin edition and English translation of a fragmentary collection of pithy moral tales composed in the first decades of the thirteenth century. While the seventeenth-century cataloguer of the sole manuscript that preserves them called these stories Narrationes aliquot fabulosae (“Some fanciful tales”), the editor of the present volume has renamed them The Llanthony Stories to reflect the fact that the collection originated at the Augustinian priory of St. Mary of Llanthony in Gloucester. The Llanthony Stories comprise thirty-five short anecdotes featuring a number of well-known historical persons, including kings, bishops, and crusaders, as well as nameless characters of lesser ranks. Many of these stories (or versions thereof) have analogues in contemporary exempla collections attributed to Jacques de Vitry, Caesarius of Heisterbach, and Odo of Chariton, though several are unique to this collection. Taken together, these tales provide “an important and hitherto little noticed witness to ecclesiastical and public life in the Welsh Marches in the decades bracketing 1200” (2).