1475-1480

The period from 1475 to 1480 marks an early milestone in the print history of Aesop’s Fables: Bonus Accursius printed a collection compiled by Maximus Planudes, bringing a body of stories long transmitted and reshaped through manuscript and translation into print. The edition formed part of the revival and wider circulation that eventually carried the fables into English and helped establish their place in European literary culture.

The Planudes Collection in Print

The collection printed by Accursius was associated with Maximus Planudes, a learned monk of Constantinople who had assembled about 150 fables in the early fourteenth century. The book’s account presents Planudes’ compilation as a key link in transmission: although it acknowledges disputes over whether he adapted Babrias or invented some material, it judges that he knew genuine Aesopian fables, probably through versions affected by translation and rhetorical exercises. His collection became the foundation of early printed editions and drew renewed scholarly attention to the fables.

Accursius’s printing did not make the collection a single, untouched work by Aesop. The preface explains that the fables had first circulated orally, that later writers preserved or recast them, and that the surviving corpus included material from different periods. The printed Planudes collection was therefore an important vehicle for transmission, not proof of uniform authorship or an unaltered ancient text.

From Italian Printing to English

Within five years of the Accursius edition, William Caxton translated the collection into English and printed it at Westminster Abbey in 1485. The sequence links an Italian printed text to an English-language edition and shows how printing accelerated the fables’ movement across linguistic and regional boundaries.

The wider revival of Aesop’s Fables in the West is placed against the recovery of learning in Italy and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The preface also notes that Latin translations by Lorenzo Valla contributed to renewed scholarly interest. Accursius’s edition belongs to this broader shift: classical material once dependent on manuscript circulation could now be reproduced and distributed through print.

Additions and Changing Texts

The book’s history of transmission stresses that printed collections could absorb material beyond the inherited Planudes corpus. It identifies stories drawn from Poggio Bracciolini’s Liber Facetiarum, published in 1471, including “The Miller, His Son, and the Ass” and “The Fox and the Woodcutter.” It also observes that amusing stories used in public sermons were interpolated into the fable tradition. These examples distinguish the act of printing from the fixing of a definitive text: circulation brought additions and adaptations along with the older stories.

Later editions continued to expand the corpus. In 1546 Robert Stephens issued a second printed edition of the Planudes collection, adding fables from a manuscript in the Royal Library in Paris. In 1610 Isaac Nicholas Nevelet’s Mythologia Aesopica assembled the Planudes collection alongside 136 previously unpublished fables from Vatican manuscripts, 40 attributed to Aphthonius, and 43 from Babrias, as well as Latin versions by Phaedrus, Avienus, and others. The Accursius printing thus stands near the beginning of a continuing process of selection, supplementation, and editorial recovery.

Significance in the Transmission History

The 1475–1480 edition helped make the fables available through a new medium at a moment when interest in classical learning was reviving. Its importance lies not in establishing Aesop as the sole author of every story, but in carrying the Planudes collection into print and enabling further translation and circulation. The preface credits Nevelet’s later compilation with restoring Aesopian fables to broad favor; Accursius’s earlier edition was one of the steps that made that later consolidation possible.