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hitherto unpublished translation, preserved principally in Lambeth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.