Biography

Goldsmith, Oliver. "The Life of Aesop." In Bewick's Select Fables of Aesop, pp. i-ix. New York: Cheshire House, 1932.

Reprints an eighteenth-century biographical essay which tries to separate fact from myth regarding the Greek fabulist's life.

Criticism

Allott, Terence. "John Ogilby, the British Fabulist—A Precursor of La Fontaine … And his Model?" Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature XXII, No. 44 (1996): 105-14.

Speculated that the 1668 collection of fables by the French writer Jean de La Fontaine may have been based on the Aesopic fables of Scots publisher and printer Ogilby.

Bentley, Richard. "Dissertation upon the Fables of Aesop." In Dissertations upon the Epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles, Socrates, Euripides, and the Fables of Aesop, edited, with an introduction and notes, by Wilhelm Wagner, pp. 569-81. London: George Bell & Sons, 1883.

Bentley's late-seventeenth-century argument against the authenticity of the Aesopic fables is accompanied by an explanatory introduction from Wagner; contains numerous passages in Greek.

Berrigan, Joseph R. "The Latin Aesop of the Early Quattrocento: The Metrical Apologues of Leonardo Dati." Manuscripta XXVI, No. I (March 1982): 15-23.

Discusses the many Aesopic fables in Greek translated into Latin and thus made available to a wider audience during the fifteenth century.

Fahy, Everett. "Introduction." In The Medici Aesop, translated by Bernard McTigue, pp. 7-15. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1989.

Gives a physical description of the fifteenth-century "Medici" volume of Aesop's fables and speculates about the artist who illustrated the volume.

Fox, Denton. "Henryson and Caxton." JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology LXVII (1968): 586-93.

Argues against assertions that William Caxton's Aesopic fables were the indisputable sources of Robert Henryson's fables.

Gopen, George D. "Introduction." In The Moral Fables of Aesop by Robert Henryson, translated by George D. Gopen, pp. 1-32. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987.

Discusses differences between Henryson's Morall Fabillis and other Aesopic fable collections, observing that Henryson devoted more attention to the moral aspects of the fables than most other translators or editors.

Hale, David G. "William Barret's The Fables of Aesop." The Papers of the Biographical Society of America (1970): 283-94.

Looks at aspects of the Aesopic fable collection of seventeenth-century Englishman William Barret, noting that Barret's undistinguished edition superseded Caxton's in popularity.

——. "Aesop in Renaissance England." The Library XXVII, No. 2 (June 1972): 116-25.

Examines the extent of the Aesopic fable tradition in Renaissance England and its dependence on translations from the European continent.

Henryson, Robert. The Moral Fables of Robert Henryson. Reprinted from the edition of Andrew Hart. Edinburgh: The Maitland Club, 1832; New York: AMS Press, 1973, 98 p.

A collection of Henryson's Moral Fables of Aesop, with an explanatory preface that focuses on Henryson's particular style and his interpretation of the fables.

Jacobs, Joseph. "A Short History of the Aesopic Fable." In The Fables of Aesop, edited by Joseph Jacobs and illustrated by Joseph Heighway, pp. xv-xxii. 1894. Reprint. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, Inc., 1966.

Asserts that fables were used in Greece as covert political commentary beginning with Aesop.

Neugaard, Edward J. "Spanish and Catalan Aesopica." In Essays in Honor of Josep M. Sola-Sole: Linguistic and Literary Relations of Catalan and Castilian, edited by Suzanne S. Hintz, pp. 161-69. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish and Catalan editions of Aesop.

Perry, B. E. Studies in the Text History of the Life and Fables of Aesop. Philological Monographs, No. VII, edited by L. Arnold Post. Haverford, PA: American Philological Association, 1936, 247p.

Technical assessment of variations between editions of fables by and works about Aesop.

Shea, John S. "Introduction." In Aesop Dress'd or a Collection of Fables Writ in Familiar Verse by Bernard Mandeville, pp. i-xiii. 1704. The Augustan Reprint Society, no. 120. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

Indicates that Mandeville drew more directly from the fabular works in verse of French author Jean de La Fontaine than from the originals of Aesop.

Taylor, Archer. "Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases in Roger L'Estrange, The Fables of Aesop." Southern Folklore Quarterly XXVI, No. 3 (September 1962): 232-45.

Collection of proverbs from the Aesopic fables translated by L'Estrange.

Wolfgang, Lenora D. "Caxton's Aesop: The Origin and Evolution of a Fable, or, Do Not Believe Everything You Hear." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 135, No. 1 (March 1991): 73-83.

Traces the sources of a medieval French poem and a similar fable attributed to Aesop.

Wooden, Warren W. "From Caxton to Comenius: The Origins of Children's Literature." Fifteenth-Century Studies 6 (1983): 303-23.

Cites Caxton's illustrated Fables of Aesop as an important medieval children's book.