The Vatican Library is identified in the book’s history of Aesopian fables as a source of manuscript material that enlarged the printed tradition. Its role is especially clear in Isaac Nicholas Nevelet’s 1610 collection, which incorporated 136 previously unpublished fables from manuscripts in the library, and in Francesco de Furia’s later publication of further fables from a Vatican manuscript.

Manuscripts in Nevelet’s Collection

In 1610, the Swiss scholar Isaac Nicholas Nevelet published Mythologia Aesopica, described in the preface as the most complete collection of Aesopian fables yet issued. Alongside fables from the collection of Maximus Planudes and material already reproduced in earlier editions, Nevelet included 136 new fables, previously unpublished, from manuscripts in the Vatican Library. The edition also gathered 40 fables attributed to Aphthonius and 43 from Babrias, as well as Latin versions by Phaedrus, Avienus, and other authors. The Vatican manuscripts thus contributed a distinct, substantial body of material to a compilation designed to bring dispersed strands of the fable tradition together.

The preface presents Nevelet’s volume as a culminating point in the recovery of Aesop’s reputation and the broad circulation of the fables. Its claim for the importance of the Vatican material rests on its concrete contribution to the collection: the 136 texts were new to print, expanding what readers could encounter beyond the earlier Planudean editions.

Further Fables and Questions of Transmission

The library appears again in the account of Francesco de Furia, who printed several fables from a manuscript held there. His publication supplied further testimony that fables circulated in manuscript forms beyond those represented in the established printed collections. The account connects this work with the scholarly effort to determine how much of the material attributed to Aesop derived from earlier collectors and how much had been transmitted or reshaped in later versions.

The preface also describes the long-running debate over Babrias. Nevelet had suggested that Babrias might be the author of the existing form of the fables; later scholars examined evidence such as vocabulary and meter, and de Furia’s Vatican manuscript publication added previously unpublished fables to that discussion. The passage does not identify the Vatican manuscript with the later-discovered Babrias manuscript at the convent of St. Laura on Mount Athos. Rather, it assigns the Vatican Library a separate role in the accumulation and study of textual evidence.

Place in the Book’s Source History

The Vatican Library’s importance in this account is documentary: its manuscripts provided material that could be edited, printed, and compared with other versions. The preface traces the fables through oral transmission, collections, translations, and manuscript discoveries, and names the Vatican Library among the repositories that preserved texts relevant to that history. Its holdings helped turn a tradition attributed broadly to Aesop into a larger, more varied corpus available to scholars and readers, while the differences in provenance and attribution remained part of the scholarly record.