The Fables of 'Walter of England'

In the fables, for example, the U ('Ut iuuet') beginning the entire collection is a rubricated initial two lines high, and the first letters of each verse fable, as well as most of the capital letters in the prose commentaries, are distinguished by a red 21 The editor is at present engaged in a study of the influence of the com- mentaries on Avianus and Walter on six German collections written be- [...] Rather than being relegated to the margins surrounding the verse texts, each commentary segment on the first nine folios is copied immedi- ately following the fable it annotates and in the same column.25 The result is a manuscript page that narrows the gap in privilege between the verse fable and its annotations, transferring some of the authority enjoyed by Walter's 'original' texts to the glosse [...] Where the commentary is much longer or much shorter than the verse text, this scheme leads easily to the dissociation of the verse text and the rele- vant commentary segment, so that the scribe is in several cases forced to link the commentary and the verse fables by citing as lemmata the first words of the verse text; at the conclusion of some segments, the words 'sequitur textus' remind the read [...] Some of the additional material provided in these commentary glosses30 seems to reveal the glossator's familiarity with different versions of the same fables; com- pare, for example, the confident identification of the chicken's 'minus cara' in fable 1, or the gloss 'commedit,' offered twice in the second fable in explanation of the protagonists' extreme thirst. [...] After demonstrating that the 'seeds of virtue' are contained in the fables—a plain reflex of the veg- etative imagery in Walter's verse prologue—the commentary proceeds more conventionally to an analysis of the form of the collection; it is noted that the fabulist both propones and invokes in a prologue before narrating in the fables themselves.34 There follows a discussion of the apologus, the mo