Edited By Alexandra Barratt (1983). Edition from MS Bodley 423.
This unpublished text of ca. 1400 is one of two extant independent Middle English translations of the popular thirteenth-century French prose text Li Livre de Tribulacion. From the Latin version (which may or may not predate the French) derives the better-known shortened Latin text, De XII Vtilitatibus Tribulacionis, printed as by Peter de Blois in the Patrologia Latina, of which two Middle English translations were printed by C. Horstmann in Yorkshire Writers. The Book of Tribulation is edited from MS Bodley 423 with variants from MS Harley 1197, an abridged version whose redactor deliberately excised or altered the many excessively literal renderings of French idiom and structure. Another independently adapted version, found in MS Arundel 286, is printed as an appendix. The original French text has never been edited; so, a transcription of a late thirteenth-century witness that is apparently very close to the text used by the Middle English translator is presented in parallel with the Middle English text at the bottom of the page.
This volume is currently out of print.