Gesta Romanorum

Title given to a collection of short, didactic Latin stories for the use of preachers. It was made, probably about 1300 (first printed about 1473), by an English Franciscan from Latin and Greek sources, and was gradually expanded with other Eastern and European material. It proved endearingly popular, despite being by humanist standards, a ‘barbarian’ text; in the age of print, it was among the earliest printed books (Utrecht, c. 1473) and an English version was printed by Wynkyn de Worde around 1510.

It recorded stories which were originally transmitted orally, and in the analogues it contains are some of the narratives which appear in the works of Chaucer, John Gower, and Shakespeare, among others. For example, it holds Chaucer's Man of Lawes Tale, the main outlines of Shakespeare's King Lear and Pericles, and Longfellow's King Robert of Sicily.