The three kings of Cologne

The most comprehensive medieval account of the Three Kings was John of Hildesheim's Historia Trium Regum (1364-75), a widely diffused text which was translated into several vernaculars. The most popular English version has for some time been accessible in a number of abridged redactions. In contrast, the present edition prints an independent and hitherto unpublished translation, preserved principally in Lambeth Palace MS 491 together with an extract in Huntington Library MS 114: the two manuscripts are in the same hand, that of a scribe whose involvement in the copying of popular Middle English works is already well known. The parallel Latin Text that accompanies the edition will be of interest to students of Middle English prose translations, as the exemplar used by the translator can be reconstructed with considerable confidence. Moreover the Latin author used a number of known and unknown sources relating to the Orient, with the result that the text contains much of relevance to the study of medieval Western interest in the East.