Latin literature, despite its decline after the classical period, is
marked by a number of names which merit eminence in their several
domains. The era succeeding the silver age hardly deserves to be called
leaden. Literature does, indeed, both descend from the Virgilian and
Ciceronian style of language, and also adopt a less classic attitude
in its themes and sentiment, but it is not without a life and value
of its own. Some of the writers are pagan, some are Christian, but
their religious professions are not to be determined by their dates.
Apuleius, the African writer, a professional rhetorician and man of
letters, who wrote his prose _Metamorphoses_ or _Golden Ass_ in the
second century, is, of course, a pagan, and by no means a model one. The
work just mentioned, probably based on current folk-tales, is entirely
fiction, narrating the story of a man turned by sorcery into an ass, and
describing his adventures, scandalous, distressful, or amusing, in the
hands of robbers and other low types of a society which, we may trust,
was not really so bad as it is here painted. Yet into this otherwise not
very edifying work there comes the exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche,
which has been so frequently translated or recast in literature—best
of all by William Morris in the _Earthly Paradise_—and so frequently
utilized as the subject of pictorial or plastic art.
From the beginning of the third century until the fifth, Christian views
find their exponents in Tertullian, Lactantius, Ambrose, Prudentius,
Jerome, and Augustine. To Jerome is due in particular that Latin version
of the Bible of which the present _Vulgate_ represents successive partial
revisions, to Augustine the _City of God_, to Ambrose the initiation of
the Christian hymn, and to Prudentius its development. Christian also is
the Gallo-Roman poet Ausonius, of the later fourth century, but his verse
is by no means dedicated to Christian teaching. In him appears what might
seem to be a modern, if not fully “romantic,” partiality for affectionate
observation of natural scenery, best illustrated by his well-known
description of the stream and banks of the Moselle.
Meanwhile among pagan writers must be reckoned Ammianus, a picturesque
and interesting historian, who undertook to bring the work of Tacitus up
to the year 378; Macrobius, whose _Saturnalia_ discourses in a desultory
fashion on a variety of literary and social topics; and Claudian, the
composer of polished poems on contemporary history, in which extremely
skilful polish of verse is united to brilliant gifts of description.
The religion of Boethius, the last man of letters who can be said to
linger on the border of the classical world, but who in style and thought
stands nearer to it than many an earlier writer, is doubtful. In all
probability he was a pagan, but he concerned himself, not with religion,
but with philosophy as reflected from Plato. His _De Consolatione_, or
_Consolations of Philosophy_, is a prose work interspersed with verses,
and in virtue of this production, which often rises to great excellence,
Boethius stood to the Dark Ages for the exemplar of the philosopher. His
place in mediaeval reading was a very high one, and may be gauged from
the fact that in England Alfred the Great translated his _Consolations_
into Anglo-Saxon, though with insertions and comments of his own. To
Chaucer, as to all the mediaeval world, “Boece” was part of the staple
library.
* * * * *
During the centuries from the decay of the literature of Rome till
the emergence of the modern literatures of western Europe there occur
the great migrations of conquering peoples and the forming of the new
nations. The Gothic conquests of Italy and Spain, the movements of the
Franks, Burgundians, and Lombards, the story of Alaric or Theodoric,
of Pharamond or Clovis, belong to history, as do the settlement of the
Anglo-Saxon and Danish tribes in Britain and the occupation of Normandy
by the men from whom it is named. Against these Teutonic triumphs
and their influence to the north must be set the Moslem triumphs and
influence to the south. Not only did the Moors conquer and hold for
centuries the greater part of the Spanish peninsula, but Sicily also
passed for five generations into the hands of the Saracens. In England
a national history commences with Alfred at the close of the ninth
century, but its development, both from a literary and social point of
view, was deeply modified at the Norman Conquest. In France and Germany
the empire of Charlemagne, the great fact of the eighth century, had
done much towards consolidating culture and reviving learning. At the
end of the eleventh century began the Crusades, which helped to bring
the western nations into closer touch with each other and also into
contact with the Greek world and with legends of the east. Meanwhile, the
Christians of north-west Spain were gradually winning back their country
from the Moors, but, in the process, absorbing no little of their Arabic
culture.
By the twelfth century the modern Romance tongues, Italian, French,
Provençal, and Castilian, are sufficiently formed for literary purposes,
and the speakers of those languages have attained to the position
of steady and settled communities. Though the English language is
temporarily in abeyance for literary uses, the English nation is free
from further disturbance, while nevertheless it is now happily placed
in direct communication with continental tendencies and ideas. In the
meantime it must not be forgotten that Europe had now become Christian,
and that in the west the teaching of one great Church was common to all
the nations.
This long period of disintegration and reconstruction is for the most
part so little studied, and is, in fact, comparatively so studiously
ignored, that we are apt to forget how long it actually was. The
literary productions of nearly seven hundred years are regarded as of so
little moment that we forget there were any at all. Yet for a proper
comprehension of the inter-relations of literature as affecting the
development of our own, it is necessary to form some conception of the
various literary currents of these “Dark Ages.”
* * * * *
As might perhaps be anticipated after a survey of the historical
movements and situations, we have to reckon with:
(1) Such Latin literature, of classical or later date, as survived after
the wreck of the empire and still formed part of, at least, the higher
reading.
(2) Such new productions in Latin as appeared before the new tongues were
formed.
(3) The matter and influence of the literature of the Church, comprising
the Hebrew Scriptures, chiefly in the shape of the Vulgate, commentaries,
moral works, and also religious legends, lives of saints, and the like.
(4) The material and spirit brought in by the Teutons in the shape of
their own old epics and sagas, with the myths which formed their basis.
(5) The Celtic feeling, traditions, and compositions which made their way
into the _répertoire_ of such countries as contained a Celtic population.
(6) The learning, literary matter, and literary art of the Saracens,
whether introduced by way of Spain or by that of Sicily, and whether
derived from Oriental or from Greek sources.
(7) Literary influences from the Greek world, including remnants of
classical and post-classical compositions, mediaeval productions of
Byzantium, and tales of the East which had been rendered into a Greek
form.
It is difficult to disentangle these various threads, which interlace
each other in complex ways, but on the whole the most satisfactory
procedure will be to make a note or two upon each. Such notes will
necessarily be brief to the point of mere hinting.
(1) It was, perhaps, to be expected that, with the decline of Latin
culture, the “fittest” part of Latin literature to survive in the
knowledge of the semi-barbarized west should be that which lacked the
highest artistic qualities. It is only with the dawn of the first
Renaissance, which led up to and was assisted by the great Tuscan trio,
that the true classics began to reappear among the common reading of men
of superior learning. Virgil, indeed, was not wholly forgotten, nor was
Cicero, and in the age of Charlemagne there was promise of a much wider
scope. But, unless with the piously inclined—and often even with them—the
Dark Ages were more interested in scraps of miscellaneous information
containing a spice of the wonderful, derived and garbled from Pliny, in
stories with a similar spice of the marvellous and, by preference, of the
licentious, such as are to be found in the _Satyricon_ of Petronius and
the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, or in traditions of the art of love culled
from Ovid and crudely transmitted. For those of a more serious turn there
were the mild philosophizing of Boethius, the history of the Spaniard
Orosius, and the encyclopaedic educational medley of Martianus Capella;
and, for the religious, the hymns of Prudentius served as a model. Yet,
though sparingly met, the reading of literary Latin never quite failed,
and verses, for example, continued to be written as much in the style
of Claudian as writers could command. Latin comedy was not unknown to
the monasteries, since the German nun Hrotswith is found in the tenth
century composing prose imitations of Terence. It is impossible, in the
defect of our material, to tell with any precision the extent to which
Latin reading was directly kept in vogue. Capella and Orosius, at least,
were accepted as standard works, but in respect of the legends, stories,
mythologies, and pseudo-marvels of natural history, such matter as shows
itself at the birth of the new literatures had in a large measure come
back in roundabout ways and through other channels.
(2) It is more easy to name the chief Latin productions of the Dark
Ages themselves. If we regard Boethius as the last figure in Roman
literature proper, the series consists mainly—for the sixth century—of
the voluminous writings of Cassiodorus, historical and educational;
the informal _History of the Franks_ by Gregory of Tours; and the work
of the Goth Jordanes concerning his own people. To the seventh century
belong the Christian and didactic _Moralia_ of Gregory the Great,
and the encyclopaedic _Origines_ of Isidore of Seville. To these we
must add two writers of Great Britain; the one, Gildas, who wrote in
Wales, in the middle of the sixth century, his dolorous account of the
conquest of Britain by the Saxons; the other, the Englishman Bede, whose
_Ecclesiastical History_ and biographical works belong to the eighth.
The age of Charlemagne, with its vigorous encouragement of education,
consolidated all the promiscuous learning of the time, in which style
plays a part altogether subordinate to the multifarious contents. From
a literary point of view the creations above-named are of little moment
to our subject, except in so far as information and misinformation from
this uncritical mass of material found its way into all the work of our
pre-Renaissance writers. Their chief merit is that they kept the channels
of classical influence from being completely blocked. We must, however,
note one important innovation in literary form. This was the introduction
of rhyme into Latin hymns. The exact source of the novelty is unknown,
but it began as early as the fourth century, and, together with Arabic
influence, it helps to account for the use of rhyme which became current
in the neo-Latin countries before their modern languages produced a real
literature.
(3) The Hebraic influence which came through Christianity is as obvious
as it was far-reaching. Every step in the Christianizing of Europe meant
the conveying, not only of new sentiment and new ways of regarding
things, but also of new materials in the way of Biblical history, however
distorted in perspective. From the new doctrines of self-mortification
there grew legends of the saints; from the traditions of their sanctity,
legends of miracles; from the persecutions, legends of the martyrs.
Both the Old and the New Testament already existed in a Latin form even
before the more competent and authoritative version of Jerome (about A.D.
400). It should also be observed that the Bible which was thus rendered
accessible was then read, far more than in later times, as a book
containing matter interesting in itself, and therefore to be utilized and
recast in story, apart from its uses in theology. Meanwhile round the
original Scriptures both the earlier and later “Fathers” built up large
masses of comment. When we remember that in the Dark Ages it was the
churchmen who kept alive literary cultivation and production, and that
the Bible narrative, the legends, martyrologies, and Christian doctrines
were conveyed to every mind by sermons and other agencies, it is manifest
how extensive must have been the effect upon thought and matter before
the newly forming literatures emerged. On actual literary art and style
it is true that there could be but little palpable influence, until, or
unless, the Bible came to exist and to be widely read, as it eventually
did in England, in the vernacular. But of this something more will be
said in a later section of this book.
(4) With the Teutonic invaders of France there came in the spirit of
feudal relationship. For centuries this spirit survived. Combined with
the Celtic exaltation which is so pronounced in the Arthurian legends,
and also with the sentiments of Christianity, it became embellished into
the well-known mediaeval conception of knighthood with its vows of utter
loyalty and self-devotion. The way was thus prepared for the knightly,
or chivalrous, romances which are to be described in the chapter on the
literature of France.
But, besides this feudal spirit shown in the Franks, there had already
existed among the Germanic tribes before their settlement in France or
Britain an orally transmitted literature. Its form was epic, and its
themes the superhuman exploits of heroes among scenes of slaughter and
carousal, in contest with huge monsters, and under the dispensation of
rude pagan deities, Woden, Thor, and the rest of the Teutonic pantheon.
Between the fourth and sixth centuries this heroic poetry of Germany
grows into appreciable form, and both the Franks of the Continent and
the Anglo-Saxons of England bring with them their several portions. In
Germany itself it is much later that the _Nibelungen Lied_ is edited into
a connected shape; but to England there came in the sixth century the
epic legend of _Beowulf_, of which the source is to be found in events
of southern Sweden and the Western Baltic dimly recorded. This poem was
edited in Christian times, and with some Christian additions, during the
literary flourishing of northern England in the early part of the eighth
century. Another poem carried from the mainland by the Englecyn was the
_Song of Widsith_ (the _Far-Traveller_), a wandering gleeman who has much
to say of the deeds and generosity of the Gothic and other German chiefs
among whom he roamed “as his fate willed,” and to whom he “unlocked his
word-hoard.”
In point of matter this Germanic contribution to Dark Age literature is
perhaps of little account. But its vigour of action and strenuous temper
did no little towards determining the virility of the French _chansons
de geste_, which formed so large a portion of English reading in the
pre-Chaucerian period. In point of form it is necessary to note that the
Anglo-Saxon method of versification, based on accent, alliteration and
assonance, is naturally inherited from the German tradition. With very
slight modification the method of Anglo-Saxon poetry is also that of
Langland in his _Piers Plowman_ of the Chaucerian age. Though this was
subsequently abandoned by English poets in favour of the French system
of rhyme and numbered syllables, the use—all the more artistic for being
disguised—of alliteration and accent has survived as one of the chief
formal beauties of all our poetry.
Whereas the Teutonic poetry, when it came in contact with Christianity in
England or France, soon lost its characteristic themes, its mythology,
and much of its savagery, the older matter and spirit still flourished
among the pagan Norsemen, and were re-imported into northern England with
the invasions of the Danes.
(5) More distinguishable and pronounced effects upon the literature
of western Europe were produced by a backward invasion of the Celtic
themes and temperament. There was much Celtic blood in northern Italy
and in Spain, still more in France and the British Islands. When once
the Celtic temperament emerged in literature it was sure of a ready and
wide response. Perhaps no such emergence would have happened if it had
not been that in the Dark Ages the Christian scholars—the only authors
of that epoch—were especially cultured and ardent in Wales and Ireland.
The racial and patriotic feelings of the British Celts were pathetic
and intense, and, whether among those in western Britain, or among the
emigrants to Brittany, the exploits of their race were celebrated in song
marked by a high spirit of pride, as well as by a peculiar mysticism and
a remarkable sentiment of chivalry and romance. The actual contributions
of the Celts to our own literary making are the subject of brief remark
elsewhere.
(6) The influence of the East during the period before the first
Renaissance was of no small importance. The language through which
it came, but not often the language in which it originated, was the
Arabic of the Saracens, whether as invaders of Spain or of Sicily. It
is precisely while the literary state of Europe was at its lowest that
the Saracenic culture was at its height. Into Spain, where the Moors had
established themselves in splendour and opulence, there followed all
the learning of the Semitic East, in philosophy, natural science, and
medicine, together with the literary forms of the Arabs and the music
of their accompaniments. Though the western Saracens were politically
altogether separate from the Caliphate of Bagdad, the literary language
was common to the Moslem world, and men of learning and artistic
gift—whether Arabs or Jews—were equally welcome at either end. In the
reign of Abd-ur-Rahman, in the early part of the tenth century, there
particularly flourished in Moorish Spain the light verse of love and its
gay surroundings. Meanwhile Cordova developed what was practically a
University, to which congregated all manner of Oriental talent, and in
which studies in science and philosophy were prosecuted with zeal. Nor
was the diffusion of all this culture restricted to the Arabs or their
Spanish subjects. Many Christians from other parts of western Europe
sought a knowledge of mathematics or medicine at Cordova, nor were these
severer accomplishments all that the visitor would acquire.
To literature proper the true Arabs would have contributed little. In
their original home their poetry had mostly taken the shape of the
_qasîda_, a loosely connected ode, in which an introduction concerning
the forsaken camping ground was regularly followed by reflections on
the singer’s love affairs, and these by thoughts concerning his desert
wanderings, his steed, and finally his chief. Of most importance to us,
perhaps, is the fact that this Arabic verse was in rhyme, and that short
odes, or _ghazels_, of fourteen lines, appear to anticipate the sonnet, a
form which arose in Sicily in a court frequented by cultured Moslems.
After the establishment of Islam, the new religion at first exercised
a cramping effect, but the same fondness for rhyme (which, indeed, was
associated with notions of sacred or magic power) introduced it even
into the prose of the Koran. When the Saracen conquest had extended
widely and included Persia, the superior culture of the Persians gave
them, from about A.D. 750, a predominating influence at the court of the
Abbasids at Bagdad. Arabic literature, therefore, widened its forms and
themes, and its poetry now embraced lyrics of love and wine, satires and
elegies, largely of Persian origin. Of this poetry in general it may be
said that it is marked by a peculiar predilection for sententious wisdom
in the shape of proverbs and aphorisms, and for fables and allegories
which convey similar maxims. These, we shall find, appear in full force
in Spain, where they are converted into part of the earliest literature
in Spanish. For the collection of such fables the Arabs and Persians
could reach a hand in either direction. From the west they could take
the Greek fables of Aesop and convert them into the Arabic fables of
Loqman; from the east they could gather the Indian fables of Pilpay (or
Bidpai), translated first from the Indian _Pancatantra_ into the Middle
Persian (better called Pehlevi), and thence by Muqaffa into the Arabic
_Kalila and Dimna_. In this collection the actions of the beasts serve
subtly to convey to a prince rules of wise conduct, more moral than the
later principles of Macchiavelli. The Orientals showed an equal passion
for purely romantic stories, provided that they contained wonderful
and magical occurrences, much prowess, and luscious suggestions of
magnificence and pleasure. _The Thousand and One Nights_, better known as
the _Arabian Nights_, form an immense body of such compositions, which
have been perpetually translated and re-translated, and which are still
among the standard books of the world.
But the Saracens were by no means sunk in sententiousness or frivolity.
They were impassioned for philosophy and science, especially the
sciences of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and chemistry. For their
acquirements in these directions they were indebted to the Greeks, and
chiefly through the Syrians of Mesopotamia. Here Hellenism, introduced
by Alexander, had grown into peculiar strength, nor was the Greek blood
itself inconsiderable. From the Syrians the Arabs derived their knowledge
both of Aristotle and of Plato, although, from their practical turn of
mind, it was the Aristotelian philosophy which they mainly affected, and
which passed into the famous Arabic translation of Averrhoes. Carried
to Cordova, much of this learning, and particularly that derived from
Aristotle, was disseminated through western Europe. The Arabic influence
on thought, reflected from Greece, was therefore great. From a more
purely literary point of view, we must reckon with the introduction of
Oriental apologues and tales, although many of these, as will be seen
immediately, come in also from eastern Europe through a Greek medium.
In point of form it is impossible not to conclude that the minstrelsy
and poetry which prevailed in Moorish Spain contributed liberally to
the fashioning of the troubadour poetry of Provence. The itinerant Arab
minstrel was not welcomed solely by Moors; he played his part among the
true Spaniards, and Spaniards themselves turned minstrels after the
same fashion. The eastern, or Catalonian, part of Spain was in language
virtually identical with the neighbouring south of France, and no border
separated the Catalonian minstrelsy from the Provençal districts. In 1112
the Count of Barcelona became the ruler of Provence, and in his train
followed all the poetry and song which had grown familiar in Catalonia.
It is dangerous to attempt to decide the more and less of direct
borrowing; but the manner of the troubadour, his rhymes, his themes of
the _tenso_, the _planh_, and the morning and evening songs, so closely
recall the machinery and devices of the Saracens, that the affiliation
can hardly be denied.
(7) Direct effect of Greece upon Europe to the West was in abeyance from
the fall of Rome till the Renaissance. Occasionally indeed, but very
seldom, we hear of scholars who read some Greek, and Theodore of Tarsus
actually visited and taught in Anglo-Saxon England in the later seventh
century. But such influence of Greek work as appears during the dark and
mediaeval times comes only in circuitous ways and from inferior writers
of inferior matter. It for the most part appears in stories derived
from the post-classical Greek romances, or from Oriental tales first
translated into Greek and then recast into Latin.
Greek romance itself—beginning as early as the second century, but
mostly produced at uncertain dates from the fourth century onwards—at
once betrays an Oriental atmosphere. Its genesis is not so much in the
Greek mind as in the eastern mind, with which the empire of Alexander
had brought the Greeks into contact. The writers commonly hail from
Asia Minor or Alexandria, and the scenes and adventures are apt to be
Babylonian, Syrian, or Egyptian. Their chief features are much the
same. A number of unlikely and inconsequent adventures, comprising
separations and stratagems of lovers, travels, voyages, dangers, pirates,
magic, murders, descriptions, and dreams, are tediously repeated with
unessential variations. One of the first examples, it is true, deals
with wanderings in the north and west, among Celts and Cimmerians. This
is the _Marvels beyond Thule_ of Antonius Diogenes. But the Babylonica
of Iamblichus and the _Aethiopica_ (or _Theagenes and Chariclea_) of
Heliodorus have their _mise-en-scène_ in the east, with events and
wonders in the Oriental style. The latter work enjoyed a special vogue,
and portions of its contents were not scorned even in comparatively late
times by Italians like Tasso and Guarini, and Frenchmen like Hardy and
Racine. This, together with the _Leucippe and Cleitophon_ of Achilles
Tatius, and the pastoral romance of _Daphnis and Chloe_ by Longus, played
no small part in the conception of the French sentimental romances of the
seventeenth century, beginning with D’Urfé and carried on by Scudéry and
La Calprenède. The work of Longus is on the whole the most important,
since it contains the new element of pastoral setting and description and
some novelty of simple sentiment. In the Dark Ages themselves we cannot
tell how far these productions were known in any direct form in the west,
but at least we know that nothing travels more quickly than stories.
Another romance, with the usual elements of love and adventure, and with
the addition of “recognition of the long-lost,” was the famous story of
_Apollonius of Tyre_, of which we possess only the Latin version, through
which the tale was passed westward. This work was favourite reading in
the age with which we are here concerned. It was translated even into
Anglo-Saxon, and later came in again as an English version of a French
rendering.
Of a different character was the _Barlaam and Josaphat_ of John of
Damascus, an ecclesiastical writer of the eighth century. The story is
derived from Buddhist sources in India. Though magic plays its part,
the whole is naturally of a moral and theological turn. The mediaeval
world found it vastly interesting, for after its conversion into Latin
by Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth century, it passed into nearly
every European language which could pretend to a literature.
Meanwhile, through Greek versions, there came in tales of purely
non-Greek construction. Chief among these was the work known to
more modern times as the _Seven Wise Masters_, originally an Indian
production, styled the _Parables of Sandabar_. This was turned into
Persian or Arabic, then into Greek under the name of _Syntipas_, thence,
in the thirteenth century, into Latin as _Dolopathos_, and thence again
versified into French.
All this material appears and reappears in the _fabliaux_ of France, in
the earliest _novelle_ of the Italians, and naturally in Boccaccio.
Other productions popular in the Dark Ages, of special note as the
storehouse upon which the French _trouvères_ in particular drew for
their classical cycles of romances (to be dealt with in the chapter on
French literature), were those attributed to “Dares Phrygius,” “Dictys
Cretensis,” and “Callisthenes.” If we place the two former under the head
of Greek work, it is because of their ascription to Greek writers and
their possible derivation, at least in part, from lost Greek sources.
They deal with the story of Troy, ostensibly from complementary points of
view—a Trojan and a Greek. That there actually was some sort of history
by Dares of Phrygia appears from a passage in Aelian; but the book _On
the Destruction of Troy_, in which mediaeval readers put their simple
trust, is a Latin production of a date probably not earlier than the
sixth century A.D., although it pretends to be a translation of Dares
by the classical writer Nepos. Similarly an actual Greek Dictys of
Crete apparently did write an account of the Trojan war and the Greek
heroes, but the book in actual use was but a fourth-century production
in Latin, asserting itself to be a translation. Portions of these two
compilations were versified, transfused, and invested with an atmosphere
of mediaeval chivalry, by Trouvères, including the Norman-English Benoît
de Sainte-More, whom again Guido Colonna, in the thirteenth century,
exploited for his Latin _History of the Trojan War_, a work which became
the standard reference for “matter of Troy” as it appears in Chaucer,
Lydgate (_Troy Book_), and Gower. It is not from Homer, but from these
pseudo-classical accounts, that we derive such episodes as those of
Troilus and Cressida.
For the cycle of Alexander the same generation of Trouvères and their
English followers were indebted to a late Byzantine writer, who pretended
to be the Greek Callisthenes, contemporary of the great Macedonian. In
point of fact his _History of Alexander_ is an imaginative mixture of
passages culled from history with eastern stories and marvels. It is, of
course, in a Latin version that this farrago became known to the authors
of the _romans_.
We must not forget the vogue during these ages, devoted as they were
to tale and apologue, of the fables of “Aesop.” Of these there were in
mediaeval times various versions and collections, some derived directly
from the Latin Phaedrus, who had versified from the Greek; others from
the later Greek remodelling by Babrius; others again from an Arabic
collection, which combined a compilation of the Greek with a compilation
from the Indian Fables of Bidpai (or Pilpay). One early version, of
uncertain provenance, was that of King Alfred; and it was apparently a
general massing of all this material which, after passing through German
and French hands, became the famous _Esope_ of Caxton.
* * * * *
To all that literary matter which pretended to classical antiquity
the Middle Ages, entirely lacking historical perspective, gave the
comprehensive name of “Roman.” How freely that term was used, and how
miscellaneous had been the sources of legend, is manifested in the
strange medley of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, known as the
_Gesta Romanorum_, in which fragments of classical history, legends of
saints, and Oriental stories, are combined without the least notion
of their relations or contradictions. To the _Gesta_ every writer,
whether in England, beginning with Chaucer, or in Italy, beginning with
Boccaccio, had free recourse for the matter of his poems or his plots.