GESTA ROMANORUM – Gesta Romanorum. [Strasbourg: Printer of the 1483 “Vitas Patrum”, c.1484].

Rare Strasbourg edition of an influential compendium of tales and fables, which provided source material for writers such as Chaucer, Boccaccio and Shakespeare. Drawn from classical as well as Arabic sources, such as the fables of Bidpai, the Gesta Romanorum was a popular medieval collection of moralizing tales known, or exempla. “It was compiled in Latin, probably by a priest, late in the thirteenth or early in the fourteenth century. […] The original object of the work seems to have been to provide preachers with a store of anecdotes with suitable moral applications.” The stories contained in the Gesta provided source material for many works written from the Middle Ages onwards—such as Shakespeare's King Lear and The Merchant of Venice—as well as works by modern writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Morris.

Among the Latin marginalia in many hands, one early reader of this copy identifies the unnamed emperor of chapter 29 as “Cambyses Rex Persarum” (Cambyses, King of Persia)—who flays an impartial judge for accepting bribery—likely recalling the similar episode in Book V of Herodotus’s Histories. BMC I 99; Bod-inc G-150; BSB-Ink G-205.050; GW 10892; Goff G-287; ISTC ig00287000.

Chancery folio (268 × 194mm). 122 leaves (of 124, lacking m1.8). (few stains, light soiling to the blank and the final leaf). Early 20th-century vellum by G. Hedberg of Stockholm, manuscript title on spine, edges red. Provenance: David Ödenhauser (1584 inscription on blank) – 17/18th-century marginal inscriptions with manuscript capitals added to part of quire l – “P.W.” (20th-century bookplate) – Howard Lehman Goodhart (1884–1952; label; gifted to his daughter:) – Phyllis Goodhart Gordan (1913–1994; leather label); by descent.