Bibliothèque du Roy is named as the Paris repository of a manuscript used to supplement the 1546 printed collection of Aesop’s fables. The preface places the library within a history in which the text was assembled from materials of different dates and origins, rather than transmitted as a single, unchanging work.

Manuscript and the 1546 Edition

The second printed edition of the collection made by Maximus Planudes appeared in 1546 from the press of Robert Stephens. Its editors added to the Planudes collection some fables taken from a manuscript held at Bibliothèque du Roy. The preface does not identify those additions individually, so the library’s documented contribution is the manuscript source, not an attribution of particular stories to the collection.

Place in the Text’s Transmission

This use of the manuscript belongs to a broader pattern of compiling and revising the fables through successive witnesses. Maximus Planudes had gathered about 150 fables in the early fourteenth century, and his collection became the foundation for early printed versions. Later editions supplemented that base with further material: Isaac Nicholas Nevelet’s 1610 Mythologia Aesopica, for example, included 136 previously unpublished fables from Vatican Library manuscripts, alongside fables attributed to Aphthonius and Babrias and Latin versions by Phaedrus and Avienus. In this account, the Paris manuscript represents one contribution to an accumulating textual tradition, while the preface gives no further description of its contents or history.

Editorial Context

The preface cautions that the collection contains fables from periods both earlier and later than Aesop. Some stories were drawn from ancient writers, while others were traced to medieval monks; it also notes later additions from sources such as Poggio Bracciolini’s Liber Facetiarum. The manuscript at Bibliothèque du Roy is therefore part of an editorial record of additions to the Planudes-based printed collection, rather than evidence that every fable in the volume originated with Aesop or with Planudes.