Producing a scientific edition of the Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus by French Dominican friar Etienne (in Latin Stephanus) de Bourbon has been a long term project for Jacques Berlioz. He has been working on the subject since the late 1970s. The existence of this edition project has been notified in different books and articles since the beginning of the 1980s. This has raised expectations of the scholars working on the field of exemplum collections and medieval sermons in general.
For a while it appeared that the promised edition was not going to come out, but then, to the great relief of the scholarly community, Brepols published the first volume in 2002 (Stephanus de Borbone, Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus. Prologus, prima pars De dono timoris. Edited by Jacques Berlioz and Jean-Luc Eichenlaub. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CXXIV. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). That volume covered the general principles of the edition, an introduction and the first part of the work. As that volume has not been reviewed in TMR and since the same editorial principles are used in the volume reviewed here, it is necessary to write a few words about the first volume before proceeding any further.
The author, Dominican inquisitor and preacher Etienne de Bourbon was active at the convent of Lyon in the middle of the thirteenth century. His magnum opus was meant to be a large moral theological compendium including necessary information for preachers and good deal of exempla to drive that information home. It was arranged according to the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. That is why in some manuscripts the work is known as De septem donis Spiritus Sancti. However, the work was left unfinished due to the sudden death of Brother Etienne in 1261. Hence the surviving work only includes the first five chapters of the originally intended seven. That did not stop Etienne's work of becoming the most widely copied exemplum collection of the Middle Ages.
Etienne's work did receive some attention as early as the end of the nineteenth century. A good deal of the exempla were extracted from it and edited separately by Albert Lecoy de la Marche in his much quoted Anecdotes historiques, legends et apologues, tires du recueil inedit d'Etienne de Bourbon, dominicain du XIIIe siecle. However, Berlioz's work is the first time Etienne's book has been edited in extenso, allowing the readers to see the exempla stories in their proper context.
Jacques Berlioz's edition is based on the group of five manuscripts including the earliest surviving version of the work, the base manuscript being BnF, lat. 15970, a manuscript which once belonged to the famous thirteenth-century Parisian scholar Peter of Limoges. The text is collated against the four other early manuscripts resulting in, as far as I can judge, a meticulously-produced edition. Furthermore, in addition to the actual text, Berlioz's edition includes wonderful indices that make it easily searchable and hence extremely useful for the historians.
As for the possible use of this material by the historians, Jacques Berlioz has himself shown the wide variety of ways the exempla literature can be used while studying the social history during the Middle Ages. Suffice it to mention his book on the history of the natural disasters that is largely based on the exempla material drawn from the very collection of Etienne de Bourbon (Jacques Berlioz, Catastrophes naturelles et calamites au Moyen Age. Micrologus Library, Vol 1. Firenze: SISMEL,1997). Another, perhaps even better known example of the use of Etienne's work in historical scholarship is the classic study on the holy grey hound by Jean-Claude Schmitt (Le Saint Levrier. Guinefort, guerisseur d'enfants depuis le XIIIe siecle. Paris: Flammarion, 1979).
Furthermore, Jacques Berlioz has taken the trouble to investigate the sources of those exemplum stories and similitudines that were not originally invented by Etienne or based on the oral tradition (there are quite a few exempla starting with the phrase auditor quod or other similar indication to the oral sources). Not surprisingly, there are plenty of stories taken from such standard sources as Vitae partum and Gregory the Great's Dialogues. However, there are also a good deal of original exempla and others that refer to contemporary sources such as Vincent of Beauvais' Specula.
The present volume of the edition includes the third part of Etienne's book dealing with the gift of knowledge (De dono scientie). The reason for publishing the third part before the second is that this particular part of the work was the subject of Berlioz's doctoral thesis and hence already well familiar to him. Publishing it first he gained time to familiarize himself better with the second part. Furthermore, as Berlioz states, the different parts of Etienne's tractate are all very particular and can be read as separate works. Hence it does not really matter in which order they are edited and published.
The particular theme of this present part is not that much the gift of science, but the penitential process. This becomes apparent with even shortest glimpse to the work and it is also announced by Etienne himself at the beginning of the third part: Tertia pars huius operis est de eis que pertinent ad donum scientie, per quod in homine efficitur uera penitentia et habetur. Not surprisingly, the structure is built around the threefold division of the penitential process, namely contrition, confession, and satisfaction.
When studying medieval preaching or moral theological tractates, one stumbles very often in the penitential process or its individual parts. Considering its importance as a subject, it is very odd that so few tractates on the penitential process have been edited and even the research literature is very much lacking on the subject (although the situation has somewhat improved with Roberto Rusconi's book L'ordine dei peccati. La confessione tra Medioevo ed eta moderna. Bologna, 2002). Therefore, the publication of a coherent thirteenth-century treatise on the subject is indeed very much appreciated.
In conclusion it can be said that Jacques Berlioz's edition of Etienne de Bourbon's Tractatus de diversiis materiis predicabilibus is a very welcome addition to the existing corpus of editions of the medieval exemplum collections. The present volume, including the third book of the original work, that is, the De dono scientie, is does not fall short of the meticulous and careful editing work familiar from the first volume. There is no doubt that exemplum scholars and others interested in thirteenth-century social or literary history are already eagerly waiting for the forthcoming volumes of this edition project.