Page:Disciplina Clericalis (English translation) from the fifteenth century Worcester Cathedral Manuscript F. 172.djvu/13

  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.

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 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. 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. 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