Sometime after November 20, 1483, William Caxton published his English translation of Jacobus de Varagine's Legenda Aurea. This is the famous medieval compilation of saints' lives which Emile Mâle names among the ten books most useful to one seeking a just appreciation of the Middle Ages and which Henry Adams ranks with the Roman breviary as a guide to the stone carvings and stained glass of medieval cathedrals. Caxton's publication, augmenting by about one-third the original treatise, was his most ambitious work as translator, editor, and printer.In preparing his Golden Legend the English printer asserts that he has used the original Latin and two translations, one French and one English. This last work is extant in nine manuscripts, more or less complete, all copies, and all representing one version. Although several critics have declared that this translation surpasses Caxton's in accuracy and beauty, some of its special peculiarities have not hitherto been considered. Who was its author? Apparently he remembered the warning of the Imitation: ‘For all man's glory, all temporal honor, and all worldly highness, to thine eternal glory compared is but as foolishness and vanity.’ His version of the Legenda is declared to be the work of ‘a synfulle wretche’ by whom it was ‘drawen out of Frensshe into Englisshe, the yere of our lorde a.M.CCCC. and. XXXVIII.’ The motive for this anonymity is revealed by the words which follow his humble self-designation: ‘whos name I beseche Jhesu Criste bi his mentis of his passioune and of alle these holis seintes afore written, that hit mai be written in the boke of everlastinge life.’
Aesthetic art of stained glass in the middle Ages Study (historical analysis)