[In the following review, Jackson summarizes some of the major ideas in Weiske's study of the Gesta Romanorum.]

In the Gesta Romanorum we have the most popular collection of exempla to have been produced in medieval Europe. That popularity is attested by our knowledge of some 270 Latin manuscripts, not to mention a substantial corpus of versions in English and German. The tradition extends down through early printings to Cammerlander's reworking of the text in the interests of the Protestant Reformation (Strasbourg, 1538), after which interest seems to have come to a somewhat abrupt end. And yet, for all its cultural importance and intrinsic interest, and despite having been the subject of scholarly attention for some 150 years, we must go back to Hermann Oesterley's edition of 1872 for the last general account of the Gesta.

Any attempt to recover an Urtext must ultimately fail. Dr. Weiske succeeds in the more modest task of providing further clarification of the relationships between the different strands of a most complex manuscript tradition. Instead of Oesterley's three groups she works with two: firstly, the more discrete, “insular” group (Oesterley's first), comprising texts that in their sequence and wording correspond more or less accurately to London, British Library, MS Harley 2270; secondly, the “Continental” group, being Oesterley's second and third families. Of those last two the former comprises the most numerous group of manuscripts (Weiske: w) and is represented by Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 54, which she takes as the base manuscript of the German tradition. The latter includes a smaller group of manuscripts (Weiske: z) as well as the printings; z has priority over w in the tradition and is represented by Innsbruck, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. lat. 310 (Weiske's MS J), which, while remaining the oldest extant manuscript and in Weiske's view offering “die beste erreichbare [Latin] Textform,” nevertheless does not represent the original form of the Gesta: for instance, the inclusion of two versions of Sarcophagus suggests an earlier redaction in which only one version would have been present.

Other such compilations of exempla are marked by a systematic approach to the ordering of the material as a whole: in the work of Stephanus de Borbone the organizing principle is provided by the seven gifts of the Spirit; in the Tabula exemplorum or the Speculum laicorum the exempla appear under alphabetically ordered themes. By contrast, in defining “das Gesta-Typische” Weiske points to the absence of such a system in this work; instead, each individual text within the collection conforms to the structure “narrative + allegorical interpretation of the narrative” with such consistency that adherence or nonadherence to this pattern can in her view constitute evidence for or against the likelihood that a particular story belonged to the original corpus. Thus Weiske's argument that the stories of the Seven Sages of Rome do not belong to the origins of the tradition but constitute a secondary interpolation is based on the fact that they often offer several different possible interpretations, whereas the standard corpus offers a single one. The interpretation itself is marked by its detailed, one-to-one equation of persons and events with their allegorical counterparts, a somewhat pedantic alignment of signifier and signified.

The use of these and other criteria in further comparison of the Gesta with a number of other collections leads to a variety of conclusions. In some instances (say, the Tractatus de historiis Romanorum, Alfonsi's Disciplina clericalis, or the Barlaam parables) the chronological relationship is left unclear. Other cases (e.g., the De ludo scaccorum of Jacobus de Cessolis) provide additional evidence that certain texts in the Gesta represent a secondary accretion. Of course, the openness of form that characterizes a compilation of this kind, a multiplicity of very short texts with no necessary principle of completeness, positively encourages ad hoc additions to and omissions from the corpus that a given scribe or redactor would have had in front of him. And, finally, by showing that Hugo von Trimberg was dependent on a redaction of the Gesta in compiling his Solsequium Weiske is able to demonstrate that a version similar to J must have existed before 1284.

Informing the Gesta is the constantly repeated theological-pastoral exposition of the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins by means of penitence, confession, and penance. This doctrine in turn derives from the equally frequently repeated facts of salvation: the inevitability of sin; the need to oppose the world, the flesh, and the devil with faith, hope, and charity; the possibility of the soul's redemption; the role of Jesus (and Mary) as the means of grace; the importance of the Eucharist. The concern for such an overall program for the collection will, in the author's view, have determined not only the allegorical interpretation of the stories but presumably their selection in the first place. There are even instances (say, Placidus) where a story was taken into the collection and not explicitly allegorized but where the force of the general pattern is such that the appropriate doctrinal interpretation is implicitly understood.

Such a concern for the sacraments long predates the Gesta, but it leads naturally to a consideration of the arguments for a Franciscan, or at least mendicant, provenance for the collection. Here, too, the evidence is inconclusive. The explicit of the Innsbruck manuscript does read “a quodam fratre de ordine minorum,” and the devaluing of worldly possessions and occasional elements of social criticism might indeed point toward the Franciscans, but such concerns were the stock-in-trade of reformist spirits generally since at least the later twelfth century; moreover, no story mentions Francis by name. We are left with a collection of “edifying reading material for those wishing to live a spiritual life.”

The second volume concludes with a bibliography, a number of indices, and an exhaustive list of the manuscripts of the Gesta, but it consists for the most part of a specimen group of texts in a synoptic printing that represents the degrees of similarity and divergence among the different strands of the tradition. What Weiske offers here is explicitly not intended to be an edition—indeed she confesses that we are still nearly as far from an “Originaltext” of the Gesta as Oesterley himself was. But she does show, firstly, how desirable a new edition is, not least because translators and even such editors as Dick have so often—perhaps embarrassed by their apparent naïveté—simply omitted the allegorical interpretations that Weiske rightly sees as indispensable counterparts to the narratives. Secondly, she shows the direction that such an edition might take, no longer based on the printings, Oesterley's practice, for those give an inaccurate idea of the original, but rather taking account of her own valuable insights into the stemmatic relationships between different subgroups of texts and the light that these shed on the putative earliest content of the collection.