The history of religion in the thirteenth century is distinguished by a concentrated effort to evangelise the laity through the medium of popular preaching, in which a leading role was taken by the friars. In their hands sermon-making became a new art, which was inculcated in their schools and through their writings. To help the preacher to perform his task they produced a large body of sermon aids in the form of treatises on method, collections of model sermons, which at this point became plentiful, and other sermon-aids, of which the most characteristic were the exempla – collections of moralising anecdotes, garnered from the Fathers, Lives of saints, romances and oral tradition, with which the preacher might enliven his discourse and capture the attention of his audience.

In this book David Jones provides a translation of two such collections, made in the thirteenth century, possibly the earliest to be compiled in Britain. The first, of which he translates the Latin text published by A. G. Little in 1908, was the work of an unidentified British Franciscan who tells us that he worked in Ireland and had been a lector to his brethren at Cork. The second, of which he provides a selection of fifty-two exempla from a total of 315, the work of an unidentified English Dominican with Cambridge connections, is extracted from the as yet unpublished Latin text in BL, ms Royal 7D i. This is an excellent edition. Jones carefully and accurately renders his texts in pleasing and readable English. He provides them with a succinct and well-documented historical introduction, placing the exempla in the context of the explosion of popular preaching in the thirteenth century, and, most notably, he furnishes them with a comprehensive thematic index. The compilers of these collections of exempla invariably name the sources of their tales – sometimes a verbal communication – to guarantee their veracity. Jones succeeds in tracing the literary sources of most of his texts, in some cases going so far as to trace the descent of anecdotes through their earlier recensions. The libri exemplorum are an important source for the ways in which the friars and other evangelists strove to implement the agenda of the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils and the degree of lay conformity with official teaching. Jones has rendered a valuable service in making this source more easily accessible.