The title of this work, Object-Pronouns in Dependent Clauses: A Study in Old Spanish Word-Order, is perhaps too inclusive. The investigation concerns itself only with the phenomenon which I shall call interpolation. Throughout this study, interpolation will be used to mean the interpolation, between an unstressed object-pronoun and its following governing verb, of another word or other words, not unstressed object-pronouns in similar construction. In Old Spanish this phenomenon is almost without exception confined to dependent clauses, i. e., clauses that begin with a subordinating conjunction, a relative pronoun, or a relative adverb with conjunctional force.

Attention has often been called to the extraordinary parallelism which exists between Sir Gowther, a fifteenth century English version of Robert the Devil, and the so-called Breton Lay of Tydorel. The latter is one of five anonymous romances published by Gaston Paris according to the manuscript in the National Library, which includes also the lays of Marie de France.

Joly's edition of the Roman de Troie represents substantially the text of the poem as it was written by the author and followed by Guido delle Colonne in his Historia Trojana. But a number of other translations were not made from the original text, inasmuch as the work offered great opportunities for interpolations, added by scribes who did not confine their activities to the duties of a mere copier. In 1888, E. T. Granz, in a Leipzig dissertation, Über die Quellengemeinschaft des mittelenglischen Gedichtes Seege oder Batayle of Troye und des mittelhochdeutschen Gedichtes vom trojanischen Kriege des Konrad von Würzburg, from a careful comparison of Konrad von Würzburg's Trojanerkrieg and the Middle English Seege of Troye, postulated, as the common source of the English and German poems, a redaction of the French work, containing episodes common to them, but differing in details from the text of the published work of Benoit. This thesis was further developed by C. H. Wager, who in the introduction to his edition of the Seege of Troye, contributed further to the problem by an examination of the relations of the three manuscripts to each other, and to their original.