1471

1471 is significant in the collection’s history as the publication year of Poggio Bracciolini’s Liber Facetiarum, a volume of one hundred jests and stories that the preface identifies as a source for two fables incorporated into the Aesopian tradition. The date anchors a specific instance of the collection’s later growth: its contents draw not only on ancient fables but also on stories circulating in the literary culture of the fifteenth century.

The Book and Its Contents

The preface describes the Liber Facetiarum as a collection of one hundred jests and stories published in 1471. It treats the book as a likely influence on the fables, rather than as an edition of Aesop or a collection wholly composed of Aesopian material. Its significance lies in the transmission of individual narratives across literary forms and compilations.

Fables Traced to the Collection

The preface specifically identifies The Miller, His Son, and the Ass and The Fox and the Woodcutter as having been selected from Bracciolini’s book. These attributions make the connection concrete: the collection’s later contents could absorb stories from a comparatively recent miscellany of jests and tales, rather than deriving exclusively from ancient authors or oral Aesopian tradition.

Place in the Collection’s Transmission

The reference to 1471 appears within an account of the learning and publishing activity that helped shape the collection. The preface also describes the printing of the Planudes collection in 1475–1480 and William Caxton’s English translation and printing at Westminster Abbey in 1485. Against that sequence, Bracciolini’s earlier book represents a source of narrative material that entered the tradition before these printed editions circulated more widely. The episode supports the preface’s broader distinction between Aesop’s name as the collection’s enduring attribution and the varied, later origins of some stories gathered under it.