SOURCE: Mosher, Joseph Albert. “The Latin Exemplum in England.” In The Exemplum in the Early Religious and Didactic Literature of England, pp. 66-67, 74-83. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1966.

In the following excerpt, Mosher discusses the Gesta Romanorum in the context of preceding and succeeding collections of moralized stories.

[The] collection of fables and tales by the English preacher and fable writer, Odo de Ceritona,¹compiled between 1219-21, is apparently the earliest in which fables are accompanied with moralizations. Although preachers used this collection as a source-book for illustrations, it was probably compiled to reform clerical abuses. Those “parabolae” which were intended for exempla, Odo inserted in his sermons but never collected.² The collected narratives, by virtue of their accompanying moralizations, acquired a greater independent value than they had hitherto possessed in the subordinate office of illustrations. The collection was composed largely of fables, but the idea of...