Circulation of Romanian translations of popular books to the East of the Prut

During the Middle Ages in the Romanian Countries, along with religious and historical manuscripts, also circulated and manuscripts of popular books. In general, this kind of literature occupies a special place in the history of Southeast European books, and a special place in the history of Romanian books. They entered the 16th century on the Greek and Slavonic lines, spreading intensively during the 17th and 18th centuries in multiple manuscript copies. Manuscripts of popular books are preserved in the collections of Romanian libraries, some of them have been put into the scientific circuit, especially texts from the 16th-17th centuries, while those from the 18th century have been less utilized. A work in which the popular traditions about animals and birds are collected, which had a prolonged influence on Romanian cultured literature, is the The Physiologist, a work that served as a Christian moral treatise and zoology manual in the Middle Ages. Fragments of that work were attested by researchers in the The Teachings of Neagoe Basarab to His Son Theodosius (1521) and in the Dimitrie Cantemir’s Hieroglyphical History.