Caxton’s 1485 printing of Aesop’s fables in English

Caxton’s 1485 printing of Aesop’s fables in English marked an important step in the collection’s passage from inherited and translated versions into print and broader circulation. Caxton translated the collection made by Maximus Planudes and printed it at Westminster Abbey, carrying a body of animal tales and moral instruction into English at a moment when printing was widening their reach.

The collection behind the edition

The fables had travelled through several stages before Caxton’s edition. They were first narrated by Aesop and transmitted orally; Demetrius Phalereus was said to have made the first collection around 300 B.C. Later, Phaedrus rendered many of them in Latin verse, and other writers and teachers adapted them into verse or prose. In the early fourteenth century, Maximus Planudes compiled about 150 fables. His collection became the foundation for early printed editions, although the versions available to him may already have been altered through translation and rhetorical exercises.

The collection’s relationship to Aesop was therefore one of transmission rather than simple authorship. The book’s preface notes that the fables were not all Aesop’s immediate work: some predated him, while others were added in later periods. Their shared form and style nevertheless secured his standing as the figure associated with Greek fable and the tradition’s founding teacher.

Printing and English translation

Bonus Accursius printed the Planudes collection between 1475 and 1480. Within five years, Caxton translated it into English and printed the translation in 1485 at Westminster Abbey. The account presents this sequence as part of the printing press’s role in extending the circulation of the fables: a collection formed through earlier transmission was reproduced in print and made available in a new language.

The English edition belongs to a wider revival of interest in Aesop’s fables in western Europe. The preface connects that revival with the recovery of learning in Italy after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and records Lorenzo Valla’s Latin translation of the fables alongside his work on classical authors. Caxton’s edition thus followed a period of renewed scholarly attention, while bringing the collection beyond Latin and earlier Greek transmission into English print.

Adaptation and the collection’s changing contents

Printing did not mean that the collection had become fixed. The preface explains that the fables had accumulated material from different periods and sources. In addition to older material, some stories were associated with medieval monks; it also identifies stories drawn from Poggio Bracciolini’s collection of jests and tales, published in 1471. The printed tradition consequently preserved not a single, untouched authorial text, but a body of fables shaped by successive acts of collecting, translation, and addition.

Planudes’ role was itself debated. He was accused either of turning Babrias’ poetic fables into prose or of inventing fables and attributing them to Aesop. The preface rejects both extremes: it allows that Planudes may have added a few stories, but argues that internal evidence shows he knew genuine Aesopian material, probably through versions already affected by translation and scholarly exercises. Caxton’s English book inherited this complex textual history through the Planudes collection.

Place in the revival of Aesop

The preface treats Caxton’s 1485 printing as part of the fables’ rapid spread through the agency of print, not as the end of their textual development. Later editions and collections enlarged or revised the inherited corpus. Most notably, Isaac Nicholas Nevelet’s 1610 Mythologia Aesopica combined the Planudes collection with newly published fables from Vatican manuscripts, material attributed to Aphthonius, and fables from Babrias, alongside Latin versions by Phaedrus, Avienus, and others.

Caxton’s edition’s significance lies in this movement between languages, forms, and audiences. It helped establish the fables in English print while transmitting a collection whose authority and contents had been assembled over centuries. The preface’s account makes the edition one stage in the continuing restoration and circulation of Aesopian fable, rather than a definitive or unchanging version.