A note on the text of the Lyon 1668 edition.

According to its title page, the edition of Lyon 1668 was "diligently cleansed of many bad omissions, otiose repetitions, and other errors that occurred passim, according to the exemplar printed in Gothic characters at Basel, 1497." The editor was Rodulphus Clutius, OP, who flourished c. 1640. He states, in his dedication of the book:

When some days ago, reverend and noble Father, this book, under the title Summa virtutum et vitiorum by the most reverend William Peraldus, once bishop of Lyon, came to my hands and I had inspected it more closely, it gave me great delight on account of the gravity and weight of its authorities that constantly appear in it as in a moral florilegium (gnomologia), with which he excites his reader to follow virtues and keeps him away from the filth of vices. And especially on account of its noble, famous, catholic, and deep doctrine, which bears the scent of the wisdom of our Angelic Doctor, saint Thomas, I would not think of laying it down before I had my fill of this pleasant meal. But alas, when I had read through most of it, I found the book, through the harm done to it by its printers and the fault of the press, to be wholly larded and filled with serious blunders and errors, besides innumerable monstrous spellings, by which a less cautious and prudent reader might be led most easily to openly false opinions. Hence it would be absolutely necessary either never to sell it in its printed form or else to work day and night to produce a more correct edition. So, I weighed within myself, on one side the natural and inherent burden of such labor, on the other the usefulness that could easily come from it, as from a rich wellspring, to the mind and spirit of its pious readers if it were to be put into print anew in corrected form and came to light for the common use and comfort of all Catholics. With all the appropriate diligence and all the strength of mind and body, I applied and dedicated myself wholly to cleansing it of its errors, so that now, thanks to God, it can be read by everyone without any danger of stumbling or falling into some error.

Clutius's first edition came out in 1618 (see Quetif-Echard 2:468).

Some spot checking of this edition against earlier printed editions as well as thirteenth-century manuscripts reveals that, indeed, Clutius "cleaned up" the text a good deal, to the extent, for example, that he replaced Peraldus's "ethicus" with "Horace," and so forth. Such practice, of course, alters Peraldus's usus scribendi drastically.

Texts translated by Siegfried Wenzel. September 1997.