Caxton’s 1485 printing of Aesop’s fables in English was a landmark in their passage from manuscript and earlier printed collections into vernacular print. Caxton translated the collection made by Maximus Planudes and issued it at his press in Westminster Abbey, extending the fables’ reach while also transmitting a body of stories shaped by centuries of compilation and adaptation.

Source and Preparation

The edition belonged to a textual tradition far older than the printing press. The preface describes the fables as first narrated by Aesop and then passed down through oral tradition. Socrates was said to have put some into verse from memory while imprisoned; Demetrius Phalereus was credited with the first collection, and later writers including Phaedrus and Aphthonius adapted fables into Latin verse and prose. The tradition therefore reached Caxton not as a single, fixed authorial text, but through successive acts of recollection, collection, and rewriting.

A particularly important stage came in the early fourteenth century, when Maximus Planudes compiled about 150 fables. The preface treats his collection as the foundation for early printed editions, while acknowledging uncertainty about its contents and sources: Planudes may have included a few invented or then-current tales, yet internal evidence was said to show that he knew genuine Aesopian material, probably in versions already altered by earlier translators and rhetorical exercises. Caxton’s English edition carried this complex inherited collection into a new language and format.

Printing and English Circulation

Before Caxton’s edition, Bonus Accursius had printed the Planudes collection in Italy around 1475–1480. Within five years, Caxton translated that collection into English and printed it at Westminster Abbey in 1485. The sequence links an Italian printed edition to an English translation and publication, making the press a crucial means by which this material could circulate beyond the settings of oral telling and manuscript copying.

The collection’s contents also bore marks of later additions and changing literary contexts. The preface notes that stories drawn from popular preaching and jest literature had entered the fable tradition; it identifies the tales of the Miller, his Son, and the Ass, and the Fox and the Woodcutter, as drawn from Poggio Bracciolini’s Liber Facetiarum, published in 1471. The Planudes collection Caxton translated thus represented a layered corpus rather than an untouched record of Aesop’s own compositions.

Place in the Fables’ Reception

Caxton’s edition was one episode in a broader revival of interest in Aesop’s fables in western Europe. The preface connects that revival with the restoration of learning in Italy and notes that Lorenzo Valla translated the fables into Latin. It also describes their growing popularity in Germany, where figures associated with the Reformation used them as vehicles for satire and protest against abuses by Roman ecclesiastics. These later developments show how the fables could move between languages and political settings while retaining their usefulness as compact vehicles of instruction.

The 1485 printing belongs to the history of transmission rather than proving that every tale in the collection originated with Aesop. The preface explicitly distinguishes Aesop’s foundational role from the mixed origins of the surviving corpus: some fables predated him, others arose later, and many were not his immediate work. Caxton’s achievement, as presented in this account, was to translate and print the Planudes collection in English, helping secure the fables a durable place in the literary circulation of the English-speaking world.