1546 AD

1546 is a documented milestone in the print history of Aesop’s fables: Robert Stephens’s press issued the second printed edition of the collection made by Maximus Planudes, incorporating additional material from a manuscript in the Bibliothèque du Roy in Paris. The edition extended an existing printed collection rather than marking the beginning of the fables’ transmission.

Place in the transmission history

The fables had first circulated through oral narration, and their early transmission was followed by later collections and adaptations. The account identifies Demetrius Phalereus as the maker of the first collection, while Maximus Planudes compiled about 150 fables in the early fourteenth century. Planudes’ collection became the foundation for earlier printed editions; the 1546 issue was its second printed edition.

The 1546 edition

The edition came from the press of Robert Stephens and included additional fables drawn from a manuscript in the Bibliothèque du Roy at Paris. The evidence does not specify the number or titles of these additions, but it establishes that the printed collection was supplemented by manuscript material. In this way, the 1546 edition joined the work of earlier compilation to a further textual source.

Historical significance

The edition belongs to the wider renewal of interest in Aesop’s fables that spread through Western Europe after the revival of learning in Italy. The fables’ growing circulation also reached Germany, where Reformation leaders used them as vehicles for satire and protest against abuses by Roman Catholic clergy. The account presents the 1546 printing as one stage in this expanding history of collection and publication, before Isaac Nicholas Nevelet’s much larger 1610 edition brought together material from several traditions.