§10. "Gesta Romanorum". XII. English Prose in the Fifteenth Century, I. Vol. 2. The End of the Middle Ages. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes. 1907

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume II. The End of the Middle Ages.

XII. English Prose in the Fifteenth Century, I.

§ 10. Gesta Romanorum.

Wholly different in kind are the moralished skeleton tales, by no means always moral in themselves, of the famous Gesta Romanorum the great vogue of which is witnessed by the fact that the Anglo-Latin recension assigned to the end of the fourteenth century was being continually copied in the fifteenth, and that an English translation then appeared, popularising this source-book of future literature, beside the English Legenda Aurea, which, half-original, half-translation, belongs to the same period.