religious purpose is the all important thing, the Disciplina Clericalis
has inverted the order of human interests and taken a remarkable
step in the direction of the inauguration of a wholly new species of
prose literature.
II.
Recent studies of the Disciplina, in its original Latin form, have
demonstrated one fact very clearly which earlier efforts had already
made probable: that this work was one of the most popular and
widely distributed treatises in the literatures of the Middle Ages[1]
Hilka and Söderhjelm have described and classified sixty-three different
manuscripts of the Latin versions of Peter Alphonse's collection,
dating from the 12th century to the 16th, which they found in
various libraries of England and the continent. Moreover it has
long been known that French translations and adaptations of the
Disciplina began to be made very early,—one version even in the
last years of the 12th and another in the 13th century. These are
poetical versions, one of which was published for the first time in
the year 1760 by the French scholar Barbazan under the title Le Castoiement d'un Père á son Fils.
A new edition of this version
was published by Meon in vol. ii of his Fabliaux et C antes des Poètes François des xi, xii, xiii, xiv, et xv Siècles
nouvelle edition. Paris
1808. A French prose translation was also made as early as the end
of the 13th century, for one of the Mss. of this translation belongs
to the beginning of the 14th century, and another to the middle of
the 15th[2]. In addition to these French versions there are known
to be Icelandic, Italian, German, Spanish, and English translations
or adaptations of the whole, or a part, of the Disciplina Clericalis,
all belonging, it seems, to the period of the Middle Ages[3]. But we
only have space here for a brief account of English versions other
than that of the Worc. Cath. Libr. Ms. F. 172. The results of the
- ↑ See the exhaustive comparative study of the Latin Manuscript versions by Alfons Hilka and Werner Söderhjelm in the Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae, Tom. xxxviii, No. 4; Petri Alfonsi Disciplina Clericalis. I. Lateinischer Text Helsingfors, 1911. Introduction, pp. i-xxix. Part II, which appeared in 1912, contains the Franzosischer Prosatext; and as planned, Part III contains two French poetical versions, and Part IV a discussion of the distribution and influence of the Disciplina Clericalis, in the literatures of the western world. Parts III-IV have not been accessible to me. Söderhjelm's 'Introduction' to the smaller edition of the Disciplina—No, 1 in the Sammlung mittellateinischer Texte (referred to in this edition by the designation 'Söderhjelm,' while the larger Latin edition is referred to as 'I, 1. 2, etc' or as 'Hilka and Söderhjelm') is important in this connection. For there he gives a list of the important translations of the Disciplina in the different languages of the world, as well as of the books about it.
- ↑ See Hilka and Söderhjelm op. cit. II, Einleitung p. i ff. On p. x of the 'Introduction' there is a description of catalanian version, the Ms. of which is said to belong to the century.
- ↑ Cf. Söderhjelm, op. cit. for more details regarding these various translations.
