F
FABLE (ISOPET)
. Of the celebrated inventor of the genre, Aesop of Thrace (6th c. B.C.), medieval writers
and compilers of fables knew little more than the name, from which derives the
appellation Isopets of the French collections. Most medieval fables belong, in fact, in the
Latin tradition of Phaedrus (1st c. A.D.), a naturalized Roman of Thracian origin, whose
name had been forgotten by the 10th century. The earliest French version of Aesop’s
fables appears to be Guillaume Tardif’s rendering (before 1498) of Lorenzo della Valle’s
Latin translation (ca. 1440) of thirty-three Greek fables.
Aesop’s fables were eclipsed by Aesopic fables of the Phaedrean kind from the 10th to
the 14th century. On Phaedrus’s work (some 150 fables) are based four major groups of
Latin adaptations: those of Avianus, Adémar de Chabannes, Rufus, and Romulus. Three
Latin prose versions are attributed to the legendary Romulus: the Romulus ordinarius
(eighty-three fables), the Romulus of Vienna and Berlin (eighty-two fables), and the
Romulus of Nilant (fifty-two fables). Two Romulus versions are in verse: the Romulus of
Nevelet (sixty to sixty-two fables), and Alexander Neckham’s Novus Aesopus (forty-two
fables). The Romulus of Oxford (forty-five fables) and the Romulus of Berne (thirteen
fables) present abridged prose versions. Vincent de Beauvais included twenty-nine
Romulean prose fables in his Speculum historiale and Speculum doctrinale.
The French fable collections are based largely on the Romulus versions: from the
Romulus of Nevelet derive the Isopet of Lyon (sixty fables; one manuscript), the Isopet I
(sixty-four fables; six manuscripts) and its prose adaptation, the Isopet III of Paris (forty-
three fables; one manuscript). Neckam’s Novus Aesopus is the source of the Isopet II of
Paris (forty fables; two manuscripts) and of the Isopet of Chartres (forty fables; one
manuscript). Vincent de Beauvais’s fables were translated by Jean de Vignay in his
Mireoir historial (first printed in 1479); an imitation of the Speculum historiale, entitled
Rudimentum noviciorum and containing twenty-nine fables, was printed in Germany in
1475 and translated into French as La mer des histoires (1488).
In five manuscripts of the Isopet I, the Romulean fables are followed by eighteen
fables inspired by Avianus (the Avionnet). A further nine fables translated from Avianus
are contained in the York Fragment (ed. Warnke), and another twenty-seven are part of
Julien Macho’s translation (1480) of Steinhöwel’s bilingual (Latin-German) edition of
147 fables of various origins, including eighty Romulean fables.
In the history of the French fable, the Anglo-Norman collection by Marie de France
(12th c.; twenty-three manuscripts) is of particular importance. While her claim to have
translated an English model is being increasingly discounted as an authorial topos of self-
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