Some English and Latin Sources and Parallels for the Morality of Wisdom A Dissertation Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Some English and Latin Sources and Parallels for the Morality of Wisdom: A Dissertation

When this study of the sources and parallels for Wisdom was begun, it was my intention to include the French field; but the mass of ecclesiastical Latin that had to be gone through proved to be so large that I found it necessary to confine myself to that and the English. Even in the Latin field, no pretence to completeness is made. For example, much of Richard Rolle's Latin work still in manuscript has not been consulted owing to the limited time which I could spend in England. (it is to be regretted that these works, which were collected by Mr. Carl Horstman for a volume in his Library of Early English Writers, have never been printed.) Likewise, Bonaventura's writings have not been accessible for a thorough examination. It is very probable that a search through these works would yield other sources. Those that have been found, however, are sufficient to show our author's relations with contemporary and earlier movements of thought, and to show his method of work. It is not likely that the finding of two or three other Latin sources would materially add to these results. With respect to the French field the situation is different. If the satire on social and political conditions, in the third division of the play, is not original with our author, it is probably based upon a French source. At any rate, the source is pretty certainly not in the writ ings of the mystics, which furnished all those that have been found. A search through the French literature might give some valuable information about another side of our author's affiliations. This investigation I hope to make in the near future.

In selecting sources for a play like Wisdom, in which most of the material is conventional, one is always in danger of attaching too much importance to mere similarity in ideas. I have tried to avoid this danger by excluding from'the list of sources all works in which there was no significant similarity in phraseology or ar rangement. In some cases I was in doubt as to a passage. For example, I feel sure that 11. 917-28 in the play follow closely an undiscovered version of a conventional complaint against man's ingratitude to Christ, one version of which is given in the passages quoted from Lambeth Ms. 853, and other versions in the works cited in the footnote (p. No one of these forms, however.

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