Editor's Preface

I received Curious Myths of the Middle Ages as a gift when I was in high school. I worked in the Noblesville Public Library for three years as a page (a book reshelver). My job was to take carts full of books back into the shelves to replace them. At the end of the evening, I would return to the check-out counter with an empty cart--almost--except for the stack of books I had selected to check out myself.

Curious Myths of the Middle Ages was one of the books I stumbled across this way; and I loved it so much I checked it out eight times in the same year. When I finally graduated from high school and got ready to go to college, the librarians surplused Curious Myths and gave it to me as a present.

It was the 1901 edition; at least one previous edition was published in 1867, and is available as a reprint from Kesington Publishers.

The 1867 edition has only ten chapters; the 1901 edition has 24, although only 18 appear in the Table of Contents. This would lead me to suspect that there was another edition between the two that carried only the 18 chapters; with the 1901 edition additional chapters 19-24 were added but the Table of Contents was not updated. Further evidence of this is that the chapter opener pages are different for the addition chapters.

I've been researching this book online and cannot find anymore information about the various editions, but I have the feeling there is more information out there. There are a number of rare editions available, although they appear to be reprints of the 1867 edition, of which I now have two copies, along with my beloved 1901.

I've also heard of a 1937 edition, but haven't been able to find out any more information about what information it contains, or if it has additional or updated chapters to the ones I have.

About This Online Edition

For the online edition, I've made several necessary changes from the printed text. I added the extra chapters and Appendixes to the Table of Contents. I've also renumbered the footnotes in order, which were treated inconsistently from one chapter to the next; in some chapters they began renumbering from 1 partway through the chapters. I suspect this was done because material was added with an attempt not to have to reset the entire book.

I added a biography of Sabine Baring-Gould, culled from various sources on the internet; I think that he is an original and curious character and should bear as much interest as the book itself.

These chapters are scanned with an Optical Character Recognition scanning program, and therefore may contain some errors. I have tried to go through each chapter twice to make corrections, but because I have only one set of eyes, I know that I have overlooked errors. I will be attempting to find a professional copy editor to look over each chapter in comparison to the original as soon as possible.

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