share that glorious sense of improbability that is the very essence of a good storybook"; and "[t]he only possible basis for selection of stories for a collection of this sort is the personal taste of the author, and Mr. Bishop's choice is splendid." However, the claims on the jacket that the stories "vary widely in theme and their characters represent every class of medieval society . . . [and that] Mr. Bishop's tales vividly illustrate medieval life and thought" struck the reviewer as "quite unjustified, as Mr. Bishop knows very well". The reviewer regretted both the lack of an effort to avoid misinterpretation and Bishop's use of "Wardour-Street English". Much of A Renaissance Storybook consisted of translations by Bishop from the Italian. A Romantic Storybook has been called "a delightful collection". Other literary studies Bishop's 1929 edition of Voltaire's Candide and Other Philosophical Tales presented Candide, , , and L'Ingénu with a small amount of commentary and notes. A reviewer of the 1957 edition (reissued in 1962) found that the editor's introduction and notes were "enlightening and lively". The review in The Modern Language Journal of Bishop's edition (1933) of Casanova's L'Évasion des plombs first reassured readers that the book "would pass the most puritanical censorship". It praised "this virile escapade", while pointing out that, even with Bishop's footnotes, the book was for the experienced reader of French. "Le Roman de vrai amour" and "Le Pleur de sainte âme" (1958), edited by Bishop's student Arthur S. Bates, presents a pair of poems, known only from a manuscript Bishop had discovered twenty years earlier in Cornell University library, of "late medieval devotional verse in monorimed alexandrine quatrains [that] possess the absurd but delicate charm of decadent piety". In one chapter, Bishop "undertakes the unlikely task of finding sources and analogues for the content of the poems in the literary and mystical currents of the Middle Ages". The reviewer for The Modern Language Review found the chapter "interesting". Of Bishop's posthumously published Saint Francis of Assisi, the anonymous reviewer for Kirkus Reviews wrote that: It is not the saint that interests him but the paradoxical and eminently human man. Bishop suggests that much of Francis' celebrated asceticism derived less from his piety than from his irrepressible sense of theatrics. . . . Not the last word in scholarship, this is nonetheless a psychologically convincing portrait . . . . endearing and empathetic.