Page:The gloria d'amor of Fra Rocabertí (1916).djvu/13

 THE GLORIA D'AMOR OF FRA ROCABERTÍ

INTRODUCTION

I.

From the early part of the second quarter of the last century down to very recent years Fra Rocabertí's vision-poem, the Gloria d'Amor, has attracted the attention of students and investigators in the Romance languages and has been the subject, in some cases, of considerable study, in others, of only brief mention.

Prior to the year 1834 Joseph Tastu, a native of Perpignan, curator of the Sainte Geneviève library in Paris, had copied almost the entire MS. in which the poem is preserved, intending apparently to publish a large part of the pieces contained therein. His papers do not show that he did any further work on the Gloria d'Amor than to make a complete copy of it. If he did not publish the results of his labors, it was partly because he learned from a "discurso preliminar " that a work