[In the following excerpt, Smalley argues that many of the entries in the Gesta Romanorum were derived from a book of exempla for sermons by the fourteenth-century preacher and teacher Robert Holcot.]

The title of the collection [of Sermons by Robert Holcot from around 1334, called] ‘Sermons for Sundays and weekdays’, does not mean that each Sunday and weekday has its sermon. Christmas Day, the Epiphany, Easter Sunday and Sundays 8-17 after Trinity Sunday are omitted. Yet the feast of the Circumcision (January 1) is included. Two sermons towards the end are headed ‘Sermo ad curatos’ and ‘Sermo ad religiosos’ respectively,¹ while the last sermon of all has no heading. It is not for preaching on a text for the liturgical year, but is intended for a clerical congregation, perhaps a synod.² There are sometimes two or more sermons for the same day; Passion Sunday has as many as seven (no. lxvii-lxxiii) of which no. lxxii is addressed to religious. The tone of all supposes a university audience or at least an audience of clergy. Most of them start from the Gospel for the day, but some take their text from the Epistle. The construction varies. All begin ‘Dearly beloved’ and end with a prayer. Within this framework we find fully worked out schemes, as recommended in the Artes praedicandi, and simple moralitates, which might have been lifted straight out of a lecture on Scripture.

A possible explanation would be that Holcot assembled notes or drafts of sermons, which he had given or thought he might give, and put them into order. The gap of ten Sundays for the summer months suggests long vacation. If he had unpublished lecture notes on New Testament books by him, he might well use them for his sermons.

The Moralitates, a series of moralised exempla for the use of preachers, are printed at the end of the Bâle edition of the Wisdom-commentary (pp. 709-48). J. Th. Welter has published a list of manuscripts and has compared the manuscript traditions. He found that the edition put the items in a more logical order than that of the earlier manuscripts and that the number of items varied slightly.³ J. A. Herbert lists and summarises the exempla in the British Museum manuscripts of the Moralitates, giving sources and analogues where possible.⁴

The date depends on the relationship between the Moralitates and the Gesta Romanorum, a compilation which seems to have originated in a Franciscan milieu in England. The earliest manuscript of the Gesta Romanorum, now at Innsbruck, is dated 1342; it represents a version which was later altered and expanded.⁵ Welter argued that the compiler borrowed from Holcot and not vice versa. A comparison of the Gesta Romanorum with Holcot's biblical commentaries bears out his argument. Only a few of Holcot's exempla are common to his Moralitates and his commentaries. The Gesta Romanorum contains many exempla from the Moralitates, but none, as far as I can see, from the commentaries. This suggests very strongly that the compiler of Gesta Romanorum borrowed from the Moralitates, where he had all the exempla collected together. Had Holcot borrowed from Gesta Romanorum he could have used it for his commentaries as well as for his Moralitates. This would give a terminus ad quem for the Moralitates of a few years before 1342, to allow time for the compilation of Gesta Romanorum before the writing of the first copy known to us. I think that the Moralitates came after the commentary on the Twelve Prophets. Here Holcot uses the ‘picture’ technique which characterises many items of the Moralitates, but it strikes me as much less effective and developed in the commentary than it is in the Moralitates.⁶ Hence the Moralitates would come after c. 1334, the date of the commentary on the Twelve Prophets, and before 1342, by which time the compiler of Gesta Romanorum had used them. …

… The anonymous Franciscan who compiled Gesta imperatorum, later called Gesta Romanorum, improved on Holcot. He drew on the Moralitates and added many tales of the same type. The title was a stroke of genius. The book tells of romance rather than of Romans, but the public it was designed for tended to identify them. It had a long life, and so had the illusion, as sub-titles of English translations will prove: The famous book intitled Gesta Romanorum, or a record of true ancient histories (1789); Gesta Romanorum, or forty-five histories originally (t'is said) collected from the Roman records (1703). Even the moralisation kept its appeal: an abridged version was offered as A Young Man's Guide to a Virtuous Life in 1698. Finally a translation appeared in 1824, which was re-edited in 1905 under the title: Gesta Romanorum, entertaining moral stories invented by the monks as a fireside recreation and commonly applied in their discourses from the pulpit whence the most celebrated of our own poets and others have extracted their plots. Thus Holcot, via Gesta Romanorum, lived on into the twentieth century as an entertainer.

Notes

1. The sermons get out of order towards the end: no. cvi, 7th Sunday after Trinity; no. cvii, 4th Sunday in Lent (omitted in its proper place); no. cviii, 18th after Trinity; no. cix, ‘sermo ad curatos’ (not on a text of the year); no. cx, 19th after Trinity; no. cxi, ‘sermo ad religiosos’; no. cxii-cxviii, 20th after Trinity up to Advent.

2. The text is Apprehendite arma et scutum (Ps. xxxiv, 2). Bishops and priests are urged to acquit themselves well in the spiritual warfare.

3. Welter [J. T. Welter, “L'exemplum” dans la littérature religieuse et didactique du Moyen Age (Paris, Toulane, 1927)], p. 360, n. 63. See also Stegmüller, op. cit. [F. Stegmüller, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1952)].

4. 106-16.

5. Ed. W. Dick (Erlangen-Leipzig, 1890). The later version was edited by H. Oesterley, Berlin, 1872. He gives the parallels with the Moralitates. On the date and origin of Gesta Romanorum see Welter, 367-75. For an account of it, see below, 183.

6. See below, 179. Welter thought that the Moralitates came after the Wisdom commentary, because the latter does not use the ‘picture’ technique at all: but neither does the Ecclesiasticus commentary, which probably belongs to the end of Holcot's life. He may have regarded it as more suitable to the exposition of the Prophets than to that of Wisdom literature.

7. See Herbert [J. A. Herbert, A Catalogue of the Brtish Museum 3 (London, 1910)], 166-79.