ABSTRACT
Chief among the obstacles that have delayed the publication of a critical edition is the transmission of the Libellus. Though scholars have been able neither to establish the authorship nor to find a second copy of the Libellus, they have had better luck with some of its sources. Like the Libellus, however, the Summa Bernardina survives only in a late copy and, perhaps for this reason, presents a less correct text than the Forma dictandi in the late twelfth-century BN 2820. The Libellus differs from more typical adaptations of the Summa dictaminum, like the anonymous Ars dictandi Aurelianensis, chiefly in the greater extent to which it supplements Bernard with material drawn from native French sources. The Libellus in particular was too broad in scope and too heavily weighted toward theory to suit the tastes of a new generation of students and teachers.
