Aesop, Authorship, and the Aesthetic Imagination

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Aesop, Authorship, and the Aesthetic Imagination

Seth LererStanford UniversityStanford, California

Aesop was everywhere in premodern and early modern Europe, from the monasteries where his fables had been Latinized and moralized, to the courts where his menagerie had come to serve the goals of social satire and political kowtowing, to the scriptoria where the production of new editions of his work would validate each copyist and editor.1 Aesop stood as a liter-ary authority, the “father” of beast fictions that would stimulate vernacular imaginations from Marie de France to Chaucer and the anonymous assem-blers of the tales of Reynard the Fox. And when print came to Europe, virtu-ally every publisher — from Spain, to England, to Italy, to Austria — put out as one of his first volumes an Aesop. Heinrich Steinhöwel in 1476/77, Julien Macho in 1480, William Caxton in 1484, Joan Patrix and Estevan Clebat in 1488, and editions from all the European cities (Ulm, Strassbourg, Paris, Vienna, Zaragosa, Verona, Milan, Lyon, and more) — the history of early printing is the history of Aesop.2

This literary and bibliographical history has been written many times.3 My purpose here is not to review all of Aesop and his afterlives; nor is it to challenge, in the large, the claims of a half-century of scholarship that has affirmed the place and purpose of Aesopica in Western literary history. I want to illustrate the ways in which Aesop becomes an emblem for “medi-eval” and “Renaissance” literature: that is, how the reading and transmission of the Fables defines periods in literary history and how, in turn, the trans-formation of some particular fables marks a social and cultural awareness of change in that literary history.

In particular, I want to argue that the marks of periodization in this context lie in attitudes toward education in aesthetic understanding. Children, medieval and Renaissance pedagogues constantly note, need not just moral instruction, spiritual inspiration, or social monitoring. They need to see the beauty in the world; need to distinguish between human artifice

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37:3, Fall 2007 DOI 10.1215/10829636-2007-014 © 2007 by Duke University Press

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and divine artistry; need to appreciate the nuance of the word. Aesop’s are often stories of ingenium — of cleverness in solving puzzles, reading signs, or getting out of difficult encounters. And that ingenium, as medievalists and early modernists well know, is not just the defining quality of Aesop’s clever animals; it is the defining quality of romance heroes, of lyric lovers, of saints and scholars. One may well argue that it may not be so much that Aesop is “medievalized” by later readers, as those later readers are “Aeso-pized” by his stories.

But in addition to these pedagogic themes, I want to suggest that the teachings of the Fables lie, too, in the ideas of transmission and translation: the very processes that marked them in their arc across contrasting periods. Though fables have appeared in virtually all recorded languages, the literary language of the Aesopica remains the vernacular. Its language was, in origin, the language of the slave — that of Aesop himself, or of the nursemaids and servants who would later tell them to the young under their charge. Our word vernacular comes from the Latin verna, a female household servant, and we might well say that the history of the fable is the history of the ver-nacular. This is the language of the subordinate, and it is significant that fables were associated with the serving classes from earliest antiquity. Later fabulists always make a point of how they translated or transformed their sources from this world: how they made something literate out of an oral tale, something poetic out of prose, something fit for privilege out of the base clay of fools. Aesop always existed to be translated, and the history of his Fables is a history of language change and textual transmission.

But language change and textual transmission are what fables are about. The Latin word fabula comes from the root fari “to tell.” Fables are told things. Quintilian, in the first century a.d., acknowledged as much when he relegated them to the purview of nursemaids. But this is precisely the point. The story of the fable is the story of the shift from oral perfor-mance to writing. The pupil, Quintilian had argued, “should learn to para-phrase Aesop’s fables, the natural successors of the fairy stories of the nurs-ery, in simple and restrained language and subsequently to set down this paraphrase in writing with the same simplicity of style (stilo).” Compare this advice with a remarkable scene from the Golden Ass of Apuleius, composed less than a century later. Having heard a fantastic story by a crazy, drunken old woman told to a captive girl, the story’s narrator laments, “I stood far off, grieving by Hercules that I had no tablet and pen to note down so pretty a fable.”4 These passages show popular speech transformed into written form.

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They dramatize the shift in origin from women, nurses, the illiterate, the crazed, to their reception by men, teachers, the literate, the sane.

That arc can be seen in the reception history of many individual fables, and for purposes of this essay, I want to look at a few fables for what they illuminate about the history of literary periodization. The first tells us something about shifts from the “antique” to the “medieval.” The story of the murderer who meets his own death had an obvious and popular appeal in antiquity (Perry no. 32).5 Here is Aesop’s version:

A man had committed a murder and was being pursued by the victim’s relatives. He reached the river Nile, and when he found a lion [other early versions have a wolf] there he was afraid and climbed up a tree; in the tree, he saw a snake and was practically scared to death, so he threw himself into the river, where a croco-dile devoured him.6

Everything is here: the crime, the animals, the retribution. It is as if the whole Aesopic menagerie (the lion or wolf, the snake, the crocodile) conspire to enact a moral judgment. Animals work their wiles not through speech, here, but action.

The popularity of this tale was not limited to early Greece and Rome. It was a mainstay of the Late Antique schoolroom. Egyptian papyri, ranging in date from the fifth to seventh century a.d., tell us much about educational instruction in the classics, and there are many examples (in Greek) of a distinctively transformed form of this Aesopic fable.

A son who killed his own father, fearing the law, took refuge in a desolate place, but when he reached the mountains, he was pur-sued by a lion. Since the lion chased him, he mounted a tree. But he saw a serpent lying on it and, unable to climb further, he was killed. The evil man never escapes from God, for the divine leads evil people to justice.7

Notice the transformations here. First, this is a story of a patricide. The murderous son is not pursued, but seeks refuge in a “desolate place” — a place not simply geographical but moral. Desolation is the spiritual condi-tion of the killer, and the lion in pursuit now stands as something far more allegorically significant than the beast of Aesop’s fable. So, too, do the tree and snake. This is a tale about the moral life, a bit of Aesopica recalibrated


for a Christian readership. The whole feel of the story changes, as the old beast fable becomes something approaching a biblical parable. Death comes through the serpent; the tree is a tree of knowledge gained too late. The resonances startle.

But there is more to this comparison than observing the transmuta-tion of a classical fable into a Christian allegory. The father-son motif now takes on an additional religious aura. For in the Bible, it is always fathers who test their sons. Abraham and Isaac, God and Jesus: these were the figurae of belief. A God-the-Father always makes true believers into children, and a literature of childhood in the Christian world cannot but chime with this controlling idiom. Aesopic fables in that Christian idiom make children’s literature into something different from what it had been before. Now we are faced not with the patria of Rome or the paternitas of emperors, but with the fatherhood of God.

Aesop’s Fables thus take on a unique position in the education of the Christian child. Church teachers and, later, monastic schools sustained to varying degrees the older Roman traditions of rhetoric and grammar. St. Augustine had shown — not only in his Confessions, but in his many manuals of doctrine — how instruction in the arts of oratory led to arts of preaching, and how the techniques of close reading could be transferred to the study of the scriptures. His interest in the fable, too, was part of his concern with Christian education. Horace, Augustine writes in his treatise Against Lying, can have “mouse speak to mouse, and weasel to fox,” and still make impor-tant points through such fictions. As to the fables of Aesop, Augustine notes “there is no man so untaught (ineruditus) as to think they ought to be called lies: but in Holy Writ also, as in the book of Judges, the trees seek a king for themselves, and speak to the olive, to the fig, to the vine, and to the bramble.”8 Horace, Aesop, and the Book of Judges stand here as fabulous narratives that convey a basic truth. They form the core of education, and it seems signifi-cant to me that Augustine should refer to someone so untaught as to think that Aesop’s fables should be called mere lies. Ineruditus: not erudite, not schooled in language or interpretation. Teaching, Augustine suggests, begins with Aesop, and the central lesson of scriptural narrative — that the literal level of a story conceals a deeper truth — can be found even in his fables.

This idea of interpretation itself — the tensions between the fictive and the true, the learned and the untaught — may lie in the reception his-tory of another fable: the story of the fox and the actor’s mask (Perry no. 27). This brief story reflects the social practice of performing drama behind masks that would project the actor’s voice and also the familiar visual cues


of personality and motive. Our word persona comes from the Latin word for the actor’s mask, and in the earliest surviving version of the fable, from the first-century Latin writer Phaedrus, the story hinges on personae and personalities.

Personam tragicam forte vulpes viderat:“O quanta species,” inquit, “cerebrum non habet!”Hoc illis dictum est quibus honorem et gloriamFortuna tribuit, sensum communem abstulit.

[A fox, after looking by chance at a tragic actor’s mask (personam tragicam), remarked, “O what a majestic face is here, but it has no brains!” This is all said for those to whom Fortune has granted honor and glory, but denied them common sense.]9

By the twelfth century, when this fable reappeared in Latin schoolroom texts and commentaries, the wolf (lupus) had replaced the fox (vulpis), but another change had taken place. The old traditions of the classical stage had vanished. Actors no longer acted with the masks of tragedy and comedy. Medieval drama had been relocated into moral exemplum or biblical story. The original premise of this fable would have been lost to medieval readers, and so the wolf now comes upon no mask but a disembodied head. In the version ascribed to Walter of England, it is a head ornately embellished, with jewelry and the hair curled, the face colored with make-up.

De lupo qui inventi caput hominis

Cum legit arua, lupus reperit caput arte superbum.Hoc beat humanis ars preciosa genis.Hoc lupus alterno voluit pede, verba resoluit:“O sine voce gene, o sine mente caput.Fuscat et extigwit cordis caligo nitorem Corporis. Est animi solus in orbe nitor.”

[While picking around in a plowed field, a wolf found a head made proud with craft. A precious human art graced its cheek. This wolf turned the head in his paws, and offered the following words: “O cheek without a voice, o head without a mind. Igno-rance in the mind obscures and extinguishes the beauty of the body. Real beauty lies only in the realm of the spirit.”]10


This splendid head now has neither voice nor thought. The prose commen-tary following the poem in its manuscript first clarifies the meaning of the wolf ’s exclamation:

“O caput pulchrum et bene ornatum, gene tue splendide sed sine voce. Caput tuum rubeum crispis crinibus ornatum sed sine racione,” quasi diceret: “Ficta est pulchritudo tua.”

[“O head with great beauty and ornamentation, your cheeks proud, but without voice. Your head made up with rouge and ornamented with curly locks, but without reason,” as if to say, “Beauty is your lie.”]

The commentary then glosses this encounter by comparing the beauty of certain books with the inanity of their readers: “Sunt enim multi qui libros pulcherrimos habere volunt sed in eis studere nolunt” [There are indeed many who would want to have very beautiful books, but they will not study them]. Such people, obviously, are like heads without minds.

A fable about honor and common sense is now a lesson for the stu-dent. But the theme of artifice was not lost on the medieval reader. A later version of this poem, incorporated into the bilingual Latin-Old French Yso-pets of the fourteenth century, retitles it “De lupo qui invenit quoddam caput pictum” [About the wolf who found a painted head].11 The head is now a piece of sculpture, and the wolf ’s line takes on a new resonance: “O cheeks without voice, O head without mind.” The Latin poem now comes with an “Addicio,” remarking on the vanity of appearance and, in a brilliant analogy, the statement that physical appearance is the mere brother to the chimera (“Apparens species fratres sunt atque chimera”).

The Old French rhymed translation, which follows the Latin together with its additional poetic moralité, now makes clear that this is a fable about art itself: about relationships between beauty and truth, about the labor that goes into artifice. King David, the psalmist, is here the source of authority, and the aphorisms in the Old French lines take on a power that transcends the schoolroom. “Biauté ne vaut riens sans bonté” [Beauty with-out goodness is worthless].12 There is no value in artistry without the labor that goes into making it meaningful.

A fable about fortune has become a lesson about art. In the little illustration that accompanies the Latin and the Old French poems in their manuscript, we see the wolf coming upon the sculpted head — a weird little moment, as if he were coming upon some bit of food, or as if this severed


head lay now like that of Orpheus, still singing perhaps as it floated down the river. For later English readers, the story of the head is now not a sculpted piece of art, but rather a disembodied human skull. In Caxton’s English ver-sion of 1484, the fable appears as follows:

The xiiij fable is of the wulf and of the dede mans hede

Many one ben whiche haue grete worship and glorye / but noo prudence / ne noo wysedom they haue in them wherof Esope reherceth suche a fable / Of a wulf which found a dede mans hede / the whiche he torned vp so doune with his foote / And sayd / Ha a how fayr hast thow be and playsaunt / And now thow hast in the [thee] neyther wytte / ne beaute / & yet thow arte withoute voys and withoute ony thought /

And therfore men ought not only to behold the beaulte and fayrenesse of the body / but only the goodnes of the courage / For somtyme men gyuen glorye and worship to some / whiche haue deseruyd to haue hit.13

There are many with great worship and glory but not prudence. How like a maxim this line must seem for the later, sixteenth-century reader; how like a goad it must seem for the stage:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times. And now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfall’n? Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor, she must come. Make her laugh at that.14

He picks the skull up, turns it in his hands much like the wolf turns the head in his paws. The history of the Aesopic imagery is here: the cheeks without a voice, now “chapfall’n”; the painted head, now transferred to the lady; the verbal performances that are the mark of acting.

The fable of the wolf and the actor’s mask, I would suggest however, provides more than just a local image for a comic scene. It stands behind the narrative of Hamlet’s play itself. What is this story but a succession of lupine,


vulpine characters coming upon tragic masks? Polonius recalls his student performance as Julius Caesar; Hamlet gives advice to player kings; heads without reason govern Denmark. The Aesop that Shakespeare would have encountered in the later sixteenth century was both a school text and a guide to life: a figuration of the ways in which a literary author could embrace the world. It was the base text for grammar and rhetoric, and in this most gram-matical and rhetorical of plays, a play about a student come home from the classroom, Aesop’s Fables guide our understanding of its episodes.

Hamlet’s recovery of Yorick’s skull enacts the cultural recovery of childhood recitation and performance. It is a fable of remembrance, a recol-lection not just of an earlier experience in the tragic persona’s life, but of an earlier experience in literary history: a time before estrangement. As with so many of the other moments of theatrical self-reference in the play, this epi-sode reflects on what has past: older performance styles, texts out of fashion, recitations of the schoolroom, or the university, or the Inns of Court, or the marketplace scaffolds rather than the public stage. It out-Herods Herod. It looks back to patterns of theatricality that, by the 1590s, appeared provincial or antiquated. We come upon the shards and leavings of the Middle Ages (that time the Renaissance itself would dub as childish, immature, and fool-ish) and find ways of reincorporating them into modernity. Where be your gibes now?

The Aesopica is full of found objects: things that travelers come upon, or objects that bad boys may steal, to illustrate the ways in which we need to teach a sense of the aesthetic, a skill with world and word. The real treasures in the Fables are the bits of knowledge they may teach. As the medieval commentator on Walter of England’s version of the wolf and the head put it, “Scientia enim thesaurus est” [Knowledge is the real treasure]. Such treasure, the commentator continues, “is not possible for a thief to steal, a mouse to gnaw through, a maggot to demolish, water to wash away, or fire to burn up.”15 And so, what happens when someone sets out to steal that treasure? Aesop has a fable on the thief and his mother (Perry no. 200), which runs as follows:

A schoolboy stole a writing tablet from another student and took it home to his mother. Instead of scolding him for stealing, she praised him. So, soon afterwards, he stole a cloak and gave it to her. She praised him again. As he grew up, he continued to steal, and she continued to praise. One day, he was caught in the act and sentenced to death. Just before his execution, he went to


whisper to his mother and, instead, bit off her ear. To her denun-ciation, he replied, “If you had punished me long ago, when I gave you that stolen school tablet, I would never have progressed as a thief to the point where I would be led to my death here.”16

The moral of the story seems transparent — nip bad behavior in the bud — but the imagery is telling. Notice that it is a writing tablet that the boy first steals. The fable locates action in the schoolroom, making this not just a tale for the school but about the school. It is an orally transmitted story about writing, about stealing instruments of learning and development. But it is, too, a story in praise of those instruments, as if the writing tablet were as valuable as a cloak. Learning is a precious thing here.

Or take the story of the boy on the wild horse (Perry no. 457). The narrator announces:

[Y]ou are in the same trouble they say a boy had when he got on a wild horse. The horse ran away with him, of course, and he couldn’t get off while it kept on running. Someone saw him and asked him where he was going. The boy pointed to the horse and said, “Wherever he likes.”17

Like the tale of the thief, this is a story of youth out of control. Childhood is in many ways like riding a wild horse. We need to find our right direction, not be driven by the whims of wildness. Like this wild child, other boys are constantly in trouble in Aesop. The drowning boy (Perry no. 211) calls for help, yet gets only a reprimand from a passerby. “Come help me now,” the boy calls out, “you may scold me later when I have been saved.” In another fable, a boy is collecting locusts and is about to pick up a scorpion, which he mistakes for a locust (Perry no. 199). The scorpion calls out, “Would that you had done that; then you would have lost the locusts that you already have.”18

These fables evoke a world of children and its challenges to the ritu-als and rigors of adulthood. They take parent-child relationships as their theme. Many focus on those relationships of power and control central to childish fantasy. It is not simply that Aesop offers up a world in which beasts speak, or that his simple morals seem appropriate for younger ears. It is that his Fables are about the child. This feature is what made the Aesopica so apposite for education, so central to the nursery and the classroom. Aesop appeals to children not just because animals talk or strange things happen,


but because the subjects of his fables remain childlike protagonists in an adult world ripe for rip-off.

How to control such children? One of the most popular fables in the Middle Ages takes this question as its theme. This is the story of the old bull and the young bullock (Perry no. 540). In the twelfth-century version of Walter of England, it is titled, “Bos maior docet arare iuniorem” [The big ox teaches the little ox to plow]. The fable is a simplified version of a text attributed to Phaedrus, and is similar to one from the fourth-century collec-tion attributed to a certain Romulus, titled “De Patre Monente Filium.” A father has an ill-mannered, vagrant son, and so to teach him good behavior and responsibility, the fable tells a story about an old ox yoked together with a young one. The old ox asks to be removed from the yoke, for the young one is struggling against it. The farmer explains that he has yoked the two together so that the old may teach the young. In the Phadrean version, it is Aesop who steps in and tells the story to the father. In the medieval ver-sions, the narrator himself tells it. In all cases, this is a kind of fable within a fable: a framed story that appealed, in particular, to the medieval taste for allegorical interpretation. The poem sets up fable-telling as a form of figura-tive instruction. It mirrors the structure of the classroom, while at the same time recalling those older idioms of labor that had made the tales of Her-cules so popular among earlier children. In Walter of England’s version, the sentences are short; there is almost no elision; and the vocabulary is relatively simple (though still heavily glossed in the manuscripts). The doctrina, or the teaching, of the fable is as follows, in the commentary to the Walter of Eng-land manuscript: “It is the duty of the parents to teach their children such that they follow them in morality and virtue through their example. The old teach the young through example and explicit instruction.”19

But there is more to this little fable than old men and oxen. Plow-ing the field had long been a controlling metaphor for writing (it is as old as the ancient Greek term boustrophedon, lines cut back and forth by oxen at the plow). The furrows of the field recalled the lines ruled on the page or letters written into the wax tablets of the schoolroom. The Latin verbs arare “to plow,” and exarare “to plough up,” connoted writing, as in this won-derful example from Martial’s Epigrams, where the poet writes to his little book that, if it is condemned by the critic Apollinaris, it would be only “fit for schoolboys to plough your backside” [inversa pueris arande charta].20 It would, he means, be suitable only for schoolboys to scribble on the back of the roll. For the child, writing was a kind of plowing: working laboriously over parchment with the pen, or digging into waxed boards with the stylus.


Phaedrus himself wrote of his project, “Whatever may come of it . . . I will plough up a third book with Aesop’s stylus” [quodcumque fuerit . . . librum exarabo tertium Aesopi stilo].21 Medieval Latin writers picked up on this idiom. To plow became not just to write but to compose literature itself — a tradition that reached its English vernacular apogee in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. At the beginning of the Knight’s Tale, the Knight remarks on the big narrative ahead of him, and his own limitations as a tale-teller: “I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere, / And wayke been the oxen in my plough” (A 886 – 87). So, too, in the prologue to the following Miller’s Tale, the drunken Miller announces that he has enough to talk about: “Yet nolde I, for the oxen in my plogh, / Take upon me moore than ynogh” (A 3159 – 60).22 As the plowman states in Walter’s fable, “With celebration, plow joyfully, you who have been tamed to the habit of plowing.”23 What better tale for young boys, learning the skills of writing, plowing the fields of parchment, irritably yoked to their old masters. And this, too, is a lesson to the masters. You may not want to work either, the fable says, but only through your example are the young to be instructed.

The fable is the field through which the medieval and early modern student plowed, and even in the few texts I have noted here we can see how the major themes of literate and aesthetic engagement with the world shape much of the Aesopica’s reception. Throughout, beastly illiterates hold a mir-ror up to errant youths, and few of these figures were more popular than that of the wolf at school. An early medieval Latin version (Perry no. 688) has the wolf instructed by a priest. The priest writes an A, and the wolf repeats the letter. Then he writes a B, then a C, and the wolf repeats them both. “Now put the letters together and make syllables of them,” he says, to which the wolf replies, “I do not know how to make syllables.” “Pronounce whatever seems best to you.” So the wolf replies, “It seems to me, these letters spell ‘lamb’ (agnus).” To which the priest replies, “Quod in corde, hoc in ore”: “What lies in the heart is also in the mouth.”24

This fable, though not original with Aesop, was nonetheless com-pellingly incorporated into the Aesopica, and it had a remarkable afterlife throughout the Middle Ages, appearing in a range of vernaculars and to a wide variety of pedagogic ends. It was clearly so popular that Pope Urban II could rely on it, in an edict of April 14, 1096, in which he criticized the clergy of Poitiers for their complaints against the monks:

Indeed, as I realized that they were not pleading for spiritual but for fleshly privileges, I spoke in seriousness a certain proverb that


ought to have shamed them, if they wanted to heed it, about the wolf set to learn the alphabet: when the teacher said A, he would say “lamb,” and when the teacher said B, he would say “pig.” They did they same, because when we promised psalms and prayers, they in response demanded things which are not beneficial to the profit of souls.25

Urban manipulates the tale somewhat, cutting directly to the moral chase rather than spelling out — in all senses of that phrase — the pedagogic reso-nances of the fable. Marie de France, however, transforms it into a reflection on intention and expression:

Un prestre volst jadis aprendreA un lu letters fere entendre“A” dist le prestre; “A” dist li lus,Que mut ert fel e enginnus.

[A preacher long ago was setTo teach the wolf the alphabet.“A” said the preacher; “A” wolf said,Who very crafty was, and bad.]26

But this wolf is more than just bad and crafty. He is “enginnus,” inge-nious, and this word recalls that whole tradition of ingenium (from which it descends) at the heart of the Latin schoolroom fables. What difference lies between the raven who puts pebbles in the jar and the wolf who cannot spell? Medieval pedagogues had allegorized the fable of the raven and the jar as a moral on ingenium: on cleverness over brute strength. Now, ingenium is subtle craft, designed not to get what is needed (water to quench thirst) but to voice what is craved (illicit food). The mouth, writes Marie, “exposes what one thinks” [La buche muster le penser].27

But here, the poet’s mouth exposes what she must be thinking: that the structures of paternalistic education fail to teach morality to the immoral; that merely learning how to read gets us not far enough. St. Augus-tine might have agreed, for his Confessions recounts in great detail how as a boy he learned first the letters, then the syllables, and then the words. And did that get him anywhere? To Carthage he came, burning with lust and a love of the theater. Only when he opened the book of scriptures and read silently to himself did he realize what it meant to be spiritually literate. In a garden in Milan, while children chanted “tolle, lege” [take and read] in the


background, he picked up Paul’s Epistles and read the first passage on which his eyes fell:

Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appe-tites.28

Marie’s wolf is trapped in the appetites of nature. His ingenium grants not the water of life, but the food of death. The wolf, always a figure of deceit, of thievery, of glib manipulation, sees real lambs when he — and his readers — should see the true Agnus Dei.

Are we reading profanely or profoundly? All children’s literature asks this question, though perhaps nowhere as pointedly as in the medi-eval Christian transformations of Aesop. That wolf, now not in sheep’s but student’s clothing, reappears again and again to symbolize ingenium gone wrong — wit and instruction pressed into the service of cupidity or vice. Those wolves are everywhere, filling the fables with their slyness. Sometimes their significance is bluntly put: one medieval Latin commentary on the fable of the wolf and the goat states, “Allegorically by the wolf the devil is understood.”29 At other times it is more subtly worked, as in the great twelfth-century Latin beast-epic, the Ysengrimus, whose hero is a wolf-monk and whose scope extends beyond the purview of the schoolroom to embrace ecclesiastical and political satire with an edge not seen again in poetry until Chaucer.

And yet, in the eddies of medieval Europe, schoolroom satirists found in this classroom animal an image for their own time. The twelfth-century French rabbi, Berechia ha-Nakdan, put together a collection of what he called his “fox fables.” Berechia may well be the same figure whose name is recorded elsewhere as Benedictus le Puncteur, the Blessed Punctuator, and his book of fables takes the Aesopica and transforms it through a distinc-tive medieval Jewish sensibility.30 In the story of the wolf and the teacher, for example, the animal is taught the alelph, beth, and gimel (the first three letters of the Hebrew alphabet). The teacher directs the wolf to put the let-ters together and pronounce them, and when the pupil combines them all together, in Moses Hadas’s translation, “[we shall] be one people. Put alelph and beth together as I do.” The wolf says, “sheep.”31 Now, this is simply bril-liant. Put b and a together and you get the “ba” of ovine utterance. The wolf is surely right that this is what the letters spell. In Berechiah’s version, there


is no protest from the wolf that he cannot complete the task (as there was in Marie de France or in the Latin versions of the tale). He simply speaks. And in his speech, he separates himself from the “one people” who have knowl-edge of the Hebrew language and its scriptures. For in the genealogy of Judaism, we are all one people, all children of Jacob. Esau, Jacob’s twin, had sold off his birthright for a bowl of porridge. Berechiah’s interpretation sees the wolf as a creature of appetite: “Wickedness will issue from his belly when evil is found in his mouth. . . . He despises Jacob and chooses Esau.”32 The wolf is of the tribe of Esau, and those who will not learn their alelph beth cannot claim for themselves a congregation before the eyes of “elohai Avram, elohai Yitzrakh, v’elohai Ya’akov” [the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob]. The fable concludes with a quotation from Solomon (Prov. 14:22): “They that devise evil go astray.” Aesop now stands with Solomon as an authority. These Hebrew texts incorporate the old, familiar dicta of the shul, if not the schoolroom, and the Jewish people (unlike this illiterate wolf) remain heirs of Jacob.

What does it mean to write a history of Aesop? It means to trace the trans-formations of a fabulist into an author. It means to chart the acts, as well as the themes, of translation throughout a history of reception. It means to illustrate how fables, born of slavery, can be applied to reinforce the hierar-chies of the master and the student. Each day I come upon another source, another language, and another collection. We come upon the fables, per-haps, much like Hamlet comes upon that skull or as the wolf upon the head — as scattered fragments of an old tradition, stripped of their finery yet still compelling. Babrius noted how he took the elements of Aesop and put “them in a new and poetic dress,” covering them, like an old warhorse, “with trappings of gold.”33 Mute manuscripts and battered books, these texts speak, still, to those who can read them. Where be your gibes now? “Scientia enim thesaurus est” [Knowledge is a treasure], says the medieval commenta-tor on Walter of England’s fable of the wolf and the head, “which it is not possible for a thief to steal, a mouse to gnaw through, a maggot to demolish, water to wash away, or fire to burn up.”34 Of all the transitory things in the world, knowledge survives. But note, too, how all of those who beset such knowledge are themselves the creatures of the fables: thieves, mice, maggots, water, and fire all live in the menagerie of the Aesopica, only to be disin-terred by those who dig the graves of scholarship.

a


Notes

1 This essay represents a portion of a longer study in progress on the history of chil-dren’s literature.

2 Among the vast and growing bibliography on Aesop and his Fables, their reception, and their transformation in Western literature, the following are essential: Ben Edwin Perry, Aesopica (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952); Perry, ed. and trans., Babrius and Phaedrus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965); Laura Gibbs, Aesop’s Fables (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and her website “Aesopica: Aesop’s Fables in English, Latin, and Greek,” complete with texts, trans-lations, bibliography, and criticism, at http://www.mythfolklore.net/aesopica/ (April 16, 2007). Specific studies keyed to particular traditions of reception, teaching, and scholarship include Klaus Grubmüller, Meister Esopus: Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und Funktion der Fabel im Mittelalter (München: Artemis Verlag, 1977); Aaron Wright, The Fables of “Walter of England” (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediae-val Studies, 1997); Wright, “Hie lert uns der meister”: Latin Commentary and the Ger-man Fable, 1350 – 1500 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Stud-ies, 2001); Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000). For a review of the printing history of the Fables, see Christian Ludwig Küster, Illustrierte Aesop-Ausgaben des 15 und 16 Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (diss., Hamburg, 1970).

3 For the medieval traditions, see Wheatley, Mastering Aesop; Wright, Fables of “Walter of England”; and Grubmüller, Meister Aesopus, all of which have full bibliographies of earlier scholarship. For Caxton’s Aesop, see Robert T. Lenaghan, Caxton’s Aesop (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); William Kuskin, Symbolic Cax-ton (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). For transformations from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, see Annabel M. Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Fables and Political History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991); Jayne Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651 – 1740 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mark Loveridge, A History of the Augustan Fable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

4 Quintilian and the Golden Ass quoted from Jan M. Ziolkowski, Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750 – 1150 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 92.

5 All fables from the Aesopic collection are referred to by their common, English titles and by their Perry numbers (the organizational numbers from Ben Edwin Perry’s publications).

6 Aesop’s Fables, trans. Gibbs, 87.7 Translated from the Greek, and quoted in Rafaela Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind:

Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 2001), 180.

8 Augustine, Against Lying, quoted, with modifications, from Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, 39.

9 Phaedrus, Fabulae I.7, ed. Perry, Babrius and Phaedrus, 201; my trans. 10 Fables of “Walter of England,” ed. Wright, 91 – 93; my trans.11 Kenneth McKenzie and William A. Oldfather, Ysopet-Avionnet: The Latin and French


Texts (Urbana: University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 1921), 181 – 82.

12 Ibid., 183. 13 R. T. Lenaghan, ed., Caxton’s Aesop (Cambridge: Mass: Harvard University Press,

1967), 98.14 William Shakespeare, Hamlet V.i.173 – 84, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller,

in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 2002), 1385.15 Fables of “Walter of England,” ed. Wright, 92 – 93.16 Perry, Babrius and Phaedrus, appendix, 459 – 60.17 Ibid., 515.18 Ibid., 462 – 63, 459 respectively.19 Fables of “Walter of England,” ed. Wright, 133.20 Martial, Epigrams IV.86.10 – 12, in D. R. Shackleton Bailey, ed. and trans., Epigrams

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).21 Phaedrus, Fabulae Book III, Prologue, lines 26 – 28, ed. Perry, Babrius and Phaedrus,

254. 22 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, in Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside

Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).23 Fables of “Walter of England,” ed. Wright, 132; my trans. 24 Perry, Babrius and Phaedrus, appendix, 585.25 Quoted in Ziolkowski, Talking Animals, 207.26 Marie de France: Fables, ed. and trans. Harriet Spiegel (Toronto: University of

Toronto Press, 1987), 216 – 17.27 Ibid., 217.28 St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, Middlesex:

Penguin, 1961), 177.29 Fables of “Walter of England,” ed. Wright, 241.30 Moses Hadas, Fables of a Jewish Aesop (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967);

Haim Schwarzbaum, The Mishle Shu’alim (Fox Fables) of Rabbi Berechiah Ha-Nakdan: A Study in Comparative Folklore and Fable Lore (Kiron, Israel: Institute for Jewish and Arab Folklore Research, 1979).

31 Hadas, Fables of a Jewish Aesop, 213. 32 Ibid., 214.33 Babrius, Mythiamboi II.107, ed. Perry, Babrius and Phaedrus, 140 – 41.34 Fables of “Walter of England,” ed. Wright, 92 – 93.

Documents

Aesop, Authorship, and the Aesthetic Imagination