Aesop and the Imprint of Medieval Thought: A Study of Six Fables as Translated at the End of the Middle Ages

Abstract

This study presents a close reading of the prologue and six fables from two early printed editions of Aesop's fables: Spencer Ger's Latin Esopus Moralisatus (1497) and Aesopi fabule (1526) in Parmigiano, a dialect of northern Italy. The fables are TMCMC, LM, The Nightingale and the Sparrow Hawk, WL, The Fly and the Ant, and The Donkey and the Lap-Dog. As the back cover proclaims, The selected fables highlight imbalances of power, different stations in life, and the central qeustion of how shall we live? The writer is interested in the voices of the page, which include those of the poet, the translator, the manuscript writer, the commentator, the glossator, and the speaker. De Weever mentions that the text he calls Esopus Moralisatus has three other names: The Fables of Walter of England; Anonymous Neveleti; and Elegiac Romulus. He is much taken with materialist philology which studies all that can and does make it onto a page: text, quotes and actions from characters in the text, translation, note, comment, gloss. Each of these has a voice. He focuses on three of Nojgaard's four original features of the Romulus collection: a novel treatment of Aesopian matter; a certain Eastern tinge; inspiration drawn from literary sources; and a structural moralization which attests an unshakeable faith in the moral worth of everyday life (17). (The second of these four will not be a focus for De Weever.) I took only a brief look at the handling of the first fable, WL. I was surprised at how close the two versions are. De Weever is -- true to his first chapter -- alert to the various voices that come off the page in things like word choice, translation, and gloss.