Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Wright - 1.djvu/19

have been taken up with great eagerness by the Christian clergy of the West, who used these tales largely in their sermons, and gave them a religious interpretation of their own. It was for this purpose that the stories were, as I have said before, collected in the old manuscripts, where we constantly find them singly or in groups forming smaller or larger collections, and written in Latin, which was the language of the mediæval church. As the priests, who had to repeat them in their sermons, which were delivered in Latin, might sometimes be at a loss for the exact details of the story, they committed them to writing in a manuscript for reference; and, in the same way, to help them in their religious interpretations, they sometimes entered in their manuscript the comment on the story. These were called moralisationes, moralizations, and it is hardly necessary to remark that these are sometimes very singular and almost droll.