1485

1485 is the publication year of William Caxton’s English translation of the fables collected by Maximus Planudes. In the preface’s account of the tradition, Caxton’s printing at Westminster Abbey helped carry the fables into English and formed part of the broader revival and circulation of Aesopian literature in western Europe.

The English Printing

The preface says that Bonus Accursius printed Planudes’ collection between 1475 and 1480. Within five years, Caxton had translated that collection into English and printed it at his press in Westminster Abbey in 1485. The sequence links an earlier printed collection to an English-language edition: Caxton’s work was not presented as a new gathering of tales, but as a translation of the Planudean compilation.

Printing gave the fables a means of circulation beyond the uncertain and changing channels through which they had previously been transmitted. The preface places Caxton’s edition among the early printed versions that helped bring the collection to a wider readership, while also recognizing that the printed tradition could incorporate material from different periods and sources.

A Layered Collection

The date belongs to a long history rather than a single authorial act. According to the preface, Aesop’s fables were first narrated orally; their transmission remained uncertain for a long period. Socrates is said to have turned some remembered fables into verse while imprisoned, and Demetrius Phalereus is credited with making the first collection around 300 BC. Later writers and teachers recast the material in verse or prose, including Phaedrus, who adapted many fables into Latin iambics around the beginning of the Christian era.

The collection associated with Planudes, which Caxton translated, was itself a product of this layered transmission. The preface describes Planudes as assembling about 150 fables in Constantinople in the early fourteenth century. It weighs competing claims that he had merely turned Babrias’ poetry into prose or had invented the tales under Aesop’s name, and concludes that he probably knew genuine Aesopian material while working with versions that had become corrupt through translation and scholarly exercises. The book’s history therefore distinguishes the reputation attached to Aesop from the varied textual sources that accumulated under his name.

Printing, Revision, and Reach

Caxton’s edition appeared amid further changes to the printed collection. A later Planudean edition, issued in 1546, included additional fables from a manuscript in the Royal Library in Paris. The preface also notes that medieval and later material entered the tradition: some stories appear to have been drawn from collections of jests and from anecdotes used in public sermons. These additions complicate any notion of a single, fixed body of tales, even as the collection continued to be recognized as Aesop’s.

The preface’s account culminates in Isaac Nicholas Nevelet’s 1610 Mythologia Aesopica, which it calls the most complete collection then published. Alongside Planudes’ fables, Nevelet included 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. Against this expanding record, 1485 represents an important stage in the English transmission of the Planudean collection, not the final or definitive form of Aesopian literature.