MLRy 97.4, 2002 1003 Vida de Segundo: Version castellana de la (Vita Secundi' de Vicente de Beauvais. Ed. by Hugo O. Bizzarri. (Exeter Hispanic Texts, 55) Exeter: University of Exeter Press. 2000. lxxvi + 46pp. ?13.99. Secundus learns as a schoolboy that there is no such thing as a chaste woman. Years later, he visits his mother anonymously and pays a servant to persuade her to lie with him. Although he remains chaste, his mother kills herself in shame. Seeing that his words were responsible for her death, he resolves never to speak again. He pursues a career ofteaching at Athens, writing but never speaking. The questions seek definitions, and the responses are often poetic: 'Que es el omne? Voluntad encarnada, fantasma del tienpo, asechador de la vida, collacion de la muerte' (p. 14). The tale is of Greek origin. As Bizzarri explains (pp. xix-xxvii), following Lloyd W. Daly and Walter Suchier, The Altercatio Hadriani et Epicteti Philosophi' and the Question-and-Answer Dialogue (Illinois: University Press of Illinois, 1939), theoldest Latin version is that of Willelmus Medicus (fl. 1167-86). From Willelmus descend Vincent of Beauvais (1190-1264), who expurgates his text, and Walter Burley (12751345 )>who takes William over wholesale. Of these, Vincent and Burley were translated into Spanish, and are the subject of the present edition. The Old Spanish Vincent firstappears as Chapter 196 of the Primera cronica general of AlfonsoX (c.1270); then as an independent text in a collection of wisdom texts (Escorial h.in. 1 and Salamanca, University, 1763); and in the fifteenthcentury as a chapter oi Bocados de oro (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional 9204; Escorial e.m.io; Majorca (?): private library of Bartolome March; Gerona: Biblioteca Lambert Mata). The link with Bocados continues into print, with three editions of 1495, 1510, and 1527. This association is understandable, as both Bocados and Segundo deal with the life and sayings of the sages. The Spanish Burley exists in three manuscripts: Escorial h.111.1, Madrid: Real Biblioteca 11-561, and Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, San Roman 39. The Burleian Secundus material does not circulate separately. To Bizzarri's bibliography we must add: Francisco Crosas Lopez, 'Notas para la edicion de la version castellana de Walter Burley, De vita et moribusphilosophorum', in Actes del VII Congres de la Associacio Hispdnica de LiteraturaMedieval, ed. by S. Fortuno Llorens and T. Martinez Romero (Castello de la Plana: Publicacions de la Universtitat Jaume I, 1999), 1, 101-12; and 'Traduccion castellana medieval del De vita et moribusphilosophorum de Walter Burley', RILCE, 16 (2000), 38-45. Medieval Spanish literature has three texts of a similar nature: Donzella Teodor, the tale of Tawaddud fromthe Thousandand One Nights, studied recently by Margaret Parker in The Story of a Story across Cultures: The Case of the Doncella Teodor (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 1996); the Spanish version of the Altercatio Hadriani et Epicteti, the Dialogo de Epicteto y el emperador Adriano, edited by Bizzarri (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1995); and the subject of the present edition, the Vida de Segundo. Both texts edited here have been edited before by Hermann Knust, Vincent in Mittheilungen aus dem Eskurial (Stuttgart: Litterarischer Verein, 1879) and Burley in Gualteri Burlaei Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum (Stuttgart: Litterarischer Verein, 1886). Ramon Menendez Pidal edited the Alfonsine Vincent in his Primera cronica general de Espana (Madrid: Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles, 1906). Although these editions are classics, the appearance of new witnesses and the work of Daly and Suchier, and of Ben Edwin Perry, Secundus the Silent Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), have made a new edition necessary. The present work opens with a solid 76-page introduction which surveys the textual tradition and establishes a stemma. There follow the editions. An important aspect of the textual history ofthe Spanish Vincent version, which Bizzarri appears not to have examined at firsthand, is precisely the earliest stage of its transmission in Spanish. As Bizzarri explains, this version firstappears in the Primera cronica general. However, he chooses 1004 Reviews as his base the independent text of h.m.i, noting readings from the Alfonsine text as edited by Menendez Pidal. Variants are exhaustively recorded. Endnotes cite the Latin original of Vincent...