a Lucia in
1832 (reprinted at Bologna, 1862) was taken has been recently discovered
and printed in _Operette inedite o rare, Libreria Dante_, Florence,
1883, No. 3. A fourth version of the end of the XIII. or the beginning
of the XIV. century is still inedited, it is mentioned by D'Ancona in
the _Libro dei Sette Savj_, p. xxviii., and its contents given. The
latest and most curious version is _I Compassionevoli Avvenimenti di
Erasto_, a work of the XVI. century (first edition, Venice, 1542) which
contains four stories found in no other version of the Seven Wise
Masters. The popularity of this version, the source of which is unknown,
was great. See D'Ancona, _op. cit._, pp. xxxi.-xxxiv.

The _Disciplina Clericalis_ was not known, apparently, in Italy as a
collection, but the separate stories were known as early as Boccaccio,
who borrowed the outlines of three of his stories from it (VII. 4; VIII.
10: X. 8). Three of the stories of the _Disc. Cler._ are also found in
the Ital. trans. of Frate Jacopo da Cessole's book on Chess
(_Volgarizzamento del libro de' Costumi e degli offizii de' nobili sopra
il giuoco degli Scachi_, Milan, 1829) and reprinted in _Libro di Novelle
Antiche_, Bologna, 1868, Novelle III., IV., and VI. This translation is
of the XII. century. Other stories from the _Disc. Cler._ are found in
the _Cento nov. ant._, Gualt., LIII., XXXI., LXVI., Borg., LXXIV.
(_Cent. nov._, Biagi, pp. 226, 51, 58); and in Cintio, _Gli Ecatommiti_,
I, 3; VII. 6.

[2] It has been generally supposed that the Oriental element was
introduced into European literature from Spain through the medium of the
French. We shall see later that this was the case with the famous
collection of tales just mentioned, the _Disciplina Clericalis_.
Oriental elements are also found in the French _fabliaux_ which are
supposed to have furnished Boccaccio with the plots of a number of his
novels. See Landau, _Die Quellen des Decamerone_, 2d ed., Vienna, 1884,
p. 107. Professor Bartoli in his _I Precursori del Boccaccio e alcune
delle sue Fonti_, Florence, 1876, endeavors to show that Boccaccio may
have taken the above mentioned novels from sources common to them and
the French _fabliaux_. It is undeniable that there was in the Middle
Ages an immense mass of stories common to the whole western world, and
diffused by oral tradition as well as by literary means, and it is very
unsafe to say that any one literary version is taken directly from
another.