SOURCE: Hooper, Wynnard. Preface to “Gesta Romanorum”: or, 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, from the Earliest Times Have Extracted Their Plots, translated by Charles Swan, revised by Wynnard Hooper, pp. iii-xiv. London: George Bell and Sons, 1877.

In the following excerpt, Hooper discusses the textual history of the Gesta Romanorum.

It is somewhat remarkable that, in spite of the great interest attaching to the Gesta Romanorum, as the most popular story book of the Middle Ages, and as the source of much literature in that and later times, no English version of it should have appeared until 1824, when a translation was published in two volumes by the Rev. C. Swan. Mr. Swan, though his translation was in many respects faulty, kept to the original...