1 The Sultan of al-Yemen’s tale begins with a deathbed scene in which a father divides his earthly goods among his three sons and sends them into the world to prosper and cooperate with one another. To each he bestows special gifts. The third receives a talent relating to animal behaviour, making this story similar to those associated with ‘The Three Brothers’ (VII.5), the third of which often learns the language of animals. Thereafter, the story goes in directions tangential to the present story as the boys travel to foreign courts seeking counsel, only to reveal such inductive powers concerning the nature of things that they are sent home as far too clever to need advice from foreigners. Arabian Nights, ed. Jonathan Scott, 6 vols. (London: Longman, 1811), Nights 329–34, vol. VI, pp. 1–7.

2 These motifs have been catalogued by Dominic Peter Rotunda in his Motif-Index of the Italian Novella in Prose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1942). These appear under such headings as J21.22, ‘Do not tell a secret to a woman,’ or J21.27, ‘Do not adopt a child.’ They have been scrupulously cited by Donato Pirovano at the bottoms of the first pages of each fable in his edition of Le piacevoli notti (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2000). The motifs correspond to those in Motif-Index of Folk Literature by Stith Thompson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–8); they are cited from time to time, in conjunction with the customized investigations into motivic design, in the commentaries to follow.

3 The formula was widespread, consisting of commands, usually three, often strange, but pronounced with the authority that comes with royal pronouncements or the wishes of the dying, all of which are broken and thereby teach valuable lessons. ‘Salomos drei Lehren’ constitutes such a set, a work that can be found in the Compilatio singularis exemplorum from MS. Tours 468, ed. Alfons Hilka, in Neue Beiträge zur Erzählungsliteratur des Mittelalters ([Breslau: Aderholz, 1913]), no. 32, p. 9. The topic is dealt with by Friedrich Seiler in his edition of Ruodlieb, der älteste Roman des Mittelalters, nebst Epigrammen (Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1882), pp. 47–74. See also Felix Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde: Alte und neue Aufsätze (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1879), pp. 36–7, who discusses early versions of this story type in the writings of Walter Map and confirms the motif in the early eleventh-century, fragmentary, anonymous Bavarian romance, Ruodlieb. See also Albert Wesselski, Märchen des Mittelalters (Berlin: Herbert Stubenrauch, 1925), pp. 219–20.

4 Attributed to Sheykh Zada and edited by E.J.W. Gibb (London: George Redway, 1886), pp. 144–53.

5 History of the Forty Vezirs (London: George Redway, 1886), pp. 114–19.

6 Gesta romanorum, ed. Wynnard Hooper, trans. Charles Swan (London: Bohn, 1876; reprint, New York: Dover, 1959), pp. 227–8. The tale originates with Macrobius in his Saturnalia, bk. II, chap. 6, according to Hooper, pp. 398–9. For those further interested in the story, the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius as well as the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais may prove fruitful. It also appears as the story.of ‘Papirius and how his father brought him to the Council’ in Le cento nouvelle antiche, translated as The Novellino by Robert Payne, with an introduction by Janet Smarr (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), no. 67, p. 101. It is also included in the Sermones vulgares of Jacques de Vitry, ed. Thomas Frederick Crane (London: David Nutt, 1890), no. 235, pp. 230–1. See also Johannes Pauli’s Schimpf und Ernst, ed. Johannes Bolte (Hildesheim: Olms, 1972), no. 392. It was also known early in England in Brit. Lib. MS. Harleian 463, folio 19, and no. 21 in the Shakespeare Jest-Books (from Mary Tales and Quicke Answeres, 1535), ed. William Carew Hazlitt (London: Sothoran [1864], 1881), vol. I, p. 31. It is also retold by Hans Sachs in his Fabeln, ‘Papirius mit den Frauen,’ Sämtliche Fabeln und Schwänke, ed. Edmund Goetze and Carl Drescher (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903), vol. IV, pp. 25–7.

7 Gesta romanorum (New York: Dover, 1959), pp. 223–5.

8 This story is retold by Hans Sachs at about the same time that Straparola was writing the Notti. ‘Der Hecker mit den dreyen selczamen Stücken’ (The peasant with the three strange commands). He is told that he must appear at court half riding and half walking, identify his worst enemy, and demonstrate who his best friend is. He too kills a calf, shows the bloody sack to his wife, and tells her of a murder he has committed. He then goes to court half on, half off, his horse, strikes his wife a blow on the face to make her betray him, and beats his dog, which nevertheless returns to fawn on him. Sachs elaborates upon the evil nature of the wife in the ‘böse Weib’ tradition of the Germans, attributing to her every imaginable diabolical attitude. Sämtliche Fabeln und Schwänke, ed. Edmund Goetze (Halle: Max Niemayer, 1913), vol. I, pp. 547–51.

9 El Conde Lucanor: A Collection of Mediaeval Spanish Stories, ed. John England (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1987), ‘De lo que contesçió a uno que provava sus amigos,’ pp. 284–91. There is also a version in August Wünsche, Midrasch Ruth Rabba (Leipzig: Otto Schulze, 1880-85), pp. 73ff.

10 Trecentonovelle, ed. Emilio Faccioli (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), no. 16, pp. 41–6. Sacchetti died in San Miniato in 1400, in his sixty-eighth year. Of his 300 novelle, some 223 survive, more often as anecdotes and vignettes than fully elaborated novelle. Many were taken from the oral culture of the time or reworked from books of exempla.

11 (Paris: Philippe LeNoir, [ca. 1525]), trans. as One hundred merrie and delightsome stories by Robert B. Douglas (Paris: Charles Carrington, 1899). It also appears as ‘Les trois monuments,’ in Les cent nouvelles nouvelles, ed. F.P. Sweetser (Geneva: Droz, 1966), no. 52; The Hundred Merry Tales, trans. Rossell Hope Robbins (New York: Crown Publishers, 1960), pp. 216–20; Celio Malespino, ‘Tre utilissimi precetti lasciati da un padre à suo figliuolo nelle articolo della morte,’ in Ducento novelle (Venice: Al Segno dell’Italia, 1609), no. 14, pp. 39v–41v. Malespini fills in many details and adds dialogue in novelistic fashion, together with a great deal of glossing on the morals, but changes few facts and no episodes. The clergyman lover becomes a coachman or carter and the author elaborates on the terracotta wall separating the rooms of the newly-weds, which the unnamed protagonist pushes with his shoulder in order to get a glimpse of his wife in bed with her lover. Also among early writers, the story appears as no. 64 in Le grand parangon of Nicolas de Troyes, a MS. of which dating to 1535–7 is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. But the work itself was largely derivative and was not discovered and circulated before 1622 or known widely to scholars before the late nineteenth century, according to Krystyna Kasprzyk in the introduction to her edition (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1970), p. ix. Émile Mabille published the first edition in 1866 (Paris: A. Franck, 1869), although the WorldCat listing cites an edition (s.l., s.n., 1510). The possibility of influence upon Straparola is slight, in any case, although such analogues speak to the wide circulation of the story type in sixteenth-century Europe.

12 Geoffrey de La Tour Landry, Le livre, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon from the MSS. (Paris: P. Jannet, 1854), chap. 128, pp. 277–90. The book dates to 1371–2 and was first translated into English by William Caxton in the second half of the fifteenth century.

13 This motif has an oblique relationship to an episode in the History of the Forty Vezirs, the Vezir’s eleventh story, in which a king’s son is reported slain but hidden away until the wrath of his tyrant father subsides. Attributed to Sheykh Zada, edited by E.J.W. Gibb (London: George Redway, 1886), pp. 133–8.

14 Del Tuppo, Aesopus. Vita et fabulae latine et italice, ed. D. De Frede (Naples: Associazione napoletana per i monumenti e il paesaggio, [1485], 1968), exemplum 8, pp. 156–7. The alleged slaughter of a favourite royal falcon is replicated in the first cantica of ‘La va da tristo a cattivo’ of Aloyse Cynthio de gli Fabritii, Libro della origine delli volgari proverbi (Venice: Bernardino e Matteo dei Vitali, 1526); ed. Francesco Saba Sardi ([Milan]: Spirali, 2007), pp. 136–9.

15 ‘Della ingratitudine’ was published in the journal Il Propugnatore, II. 1 (1869) (Bologna: Getano Romagnoli, 1869), pp. 398–441, but esp. 411–14, where it is attributed to Antonio Ceruti. The story was drawn from the Trattato dell’ingratitudine which was published without place, publisher, or date, in the second half of the fifteenth century. Further to these references, see Le piacevoli notti, ed. Donato Pirovano (Rome: Salerno, 2000), vol. I, p. 14, and Giuseppe Rua, Di alcune novelle inscrite nell’ Esopo di Francesco Del Tuppo (Turin, 1889), pp. 9–10.

16 Le piacevoli notti, ed. Donato Pirovano (Rome: Salerno, 2000), p. 810. This pamphlet was still being printed as late as 1790 in Venice, as a ‘novel’ by Gian Francesco Straparola.

17 (Paris: J.-B. Mazuel, 1715); ‘Histoire de Sinadab,’ in Contes, ed. Jean-François Perrin (Paris: Champion, 2010), vol. I, pp. 560–73; A Thousand and One Quarters of Hours; Being Tartarian Tales (London: Jacob Tonson, 1716), pp. 71–100. See also Tartarian Tales: The Thousand and One Quarters of Hours, trans. Thomas Flloyd (London, 1785), pp. 71–99.

18 The story ‘Du roi Togrul-Béy & de ses enfans’ corresponds to the present work in its opening scene with the three sons gathered around their father’s deathbed to hear his final words of wisdom. Thereafter, all features change, for the sons are given symbolic commissions which they interpret literally, and are taught by a wise man how to interpret them through a second tale in which the ambiguity of signs is illustrated. Cabinet des fées, ou, collection choisie des contes des fées et autres contes merveilleux, assembled by Charles-Joseph Mayer and Clément Pierre Marillier (Geneva: Barde, Manget & Compagnie, 1785–9), vol. 16, pp. 89–96.

19 H.C., The Forrest of Fancy (London: Thomas Purfoote, 1579), no. 69. H.C. has been identified by Ritson as Henry Chettle, by Malone as Henry Cheeke, and by Warton as Henry Constable.

20 Fiabe, 4 vols. (Palermo: Pedone Lauriel, 1875), no. 252; The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, ed. and trans. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2009), vol. II, pp. 727–9.

21 Pitrè’s no. 169, ‘Never Trust a Woman!’ is a slightly clumsier and more abbreviated version of this tale in which a man boasts of the loving attention and devotion of his wife, which a friend convinces him to challenge by purchasing a goat’s head, telling his wife he has committed a murder, and then throwing it down the well. Without provocation she goes directly to the judge and the judge comes to the door. When the well is examined they find a man with horns, redolent of the joke about the master in the well with horns that embarrasses his wife in ‘The Servant, the Fly, and the Master’ (XIII.4). The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè (ref. in previous note), vol. I, pp. 617–18.

22 One last variant may be found in Xavier Marmier, Contes populaires des différents pays (Paris: Hachette, 1888), pp. 135ff.

23 This precise configuration is retained in a tale from the Ligurian coast in which the third son apprentices to thieves, becomes their master, returns home with his booty, asks to move up in society, declares his occupation, and must prove his craft to escape with his life. His fortune allows him to marry a princess and turn honest at a subsequent place and time. ‘Le fin voleur,’ in James Bruyn Andrews, Contes Ligures: Traditions de la rivière recueillis entre Menton et Gênes (Paris: E. Leroux, 1892; reprint, Marseille: Laffitte Reprints, 1979), no. 30, pp. 137–42.

24 See Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 1–8.

25 Middle English Verse Romances, ed. Donald Sands (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1966), pp. 154–81.

26 Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets: An Anthology of Elizabethan Low Life, ed. Gamini Salgado (London: Penguin, 1972), contains five works by Robert Greene. Henrie Chettle, Kind-Hart’s Dreame, ed. G.B. Harrison (London: The Bodley Head, 1923). Thomas Dekker, Lantern and Candlelight, ed. Viviana Comensoli (Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2008).

27 Histoires des larrons, or The history of theeves. Written in French, and translated out of the originall by Paul Godwin (London: Printed by Iohn Raworth, and are to be sold by Thomas Slater, at the signe of the Swan in Duck-lane, 1638).

28 Orlando innamorato, ed. Charles Stanley Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), bk. II, cantos 39–43, p. 443.

29 In A Hundred Merry Tales and other English Jest Books, ed. P.M. Zall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 339–46.

30 Nicolaus Remigius, ‘Der vermeinte zauberische Dieb,’ in Daemonolatria, das is, von unholden und zauber Geisten (Frankfurt: Palthenius, 1598), bk. III, chap. 39. For Mayhew, see London Labour and the London Poor (London: Griffin, Bohn & Co., [1851], 1861), vol. III, p. 388.

31 ‘The Master-Thief,’ Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales (New York: Nelson Doubleday, n.d.), no. 178, pp. 565–70. For a comparative version see Sir George Webbe Dasent, Popular Tales from the Norse (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1888; New York, Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), ‘The Master-thief,’ pp. 232–51. A later North German or Scandinavian version appeared some time before 1850 in which the peasant’s oxen are stolen by dropping shoes in the road, first one, and then the second, causing the peasant to abandon the animals to go back for the first shoe. A requisite precondition in all of these tales is that the victims of the thefts should endure no bodily harm. In another ruse, the thief stages a feigned hanging of himself in three places, creating a distracting illusion. Soon the apprentice surpasses his fellow professionals. He returns the poor peasant’s oxen, but makes off for home with the robbers’ own gear, telling his father of his exploits. In the second part, a rich magistrate (Amtmann) with an attractive daughter puts the young thief to the test. First the hero plays the trick of the three hares to distract the kitchen staff and steal the roast beef. When the priest jeers at the boy, he shams the angel of the annunciation and inveigles him into a sack to be transported to heaven. The clergyman is then bounced over stones to the Amtmann’s goose house. Then comes a version of the horse theft featured in Straparola. Ultimately, he tricks the master himself, steals the sheet off his bed along with his wife’s nightgown, causes the Amtmann to shoot a dead corpse on a ladder, and finally tricks his way into a profitable marriage. Benjamin Thorpe, Yule-Tide Stories: A Collection of Scandinavian and North German Popular Tales and Traditions (London: Henry Bohn, 1853), pp. 265–78, from Peter Christian Asbjørnsen’s Norske Folk-eventyr (Christiana: J. Dybwad, 1850).

32 This story appears in English in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 70, no. 433 (November 1851), pp. 595–604, and represents a remarkable reconfiguration of many of the now familiar elements. One of three sons falls into the hands of thieves and joins the band by way of escape. He engages in a series of ruses mostly with cattle, finally making off with the band’s gold and silver before returning home. He now seeks to marry the squire’s daughter, but while the marriage is promised, there are delays. He is first challenged to steal the Sunday roast. Then, as the result of mocking the squire’s gullibility, the master-thief is commanded to lure the local priest into a sack with all his worldly goods. Still not content, the squire asks to have all twelve of his horses stolen from the stable, which the thief manages by disguising himself as an old woman and drugging the guards with brandy. The final test is the theft of the bed-sheets and his wife’s shift as well, which he accomplishes by using a dead body to distract them, as does Cassandrino, but which the squire shoots with his rifle. The story concludes with the promised marriage, largely because the squire comes to fear the thief’s prowess and decides to remain on his best side. A similar tale is part of the folk heritage of Bengal in which the thief takes the gold chain from the queen’s neck as she sleeps. A camel with gold on its back is driven through the city intentionally to tempt the thief to a further exploit. The thief drugs the driver and makes the heist. ‘Adventures of Two Thieves and their Sons,’ in Folk-Tales of Bengal, trans. Lal Behari Day (London: Macmillan, 1883), pp. 174–81.

33 Patrick Kennedy, The Fireside Stories of Ireland (Dublin: McGlashan & Gill, 1870; reprint, Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1975), pp. 38–46.

34 Trans. George Martin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 414–17.

35 Emmanuel Cosquin, Contes populaires de Lorraine, 2 vols. (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1886), vol. II, pp. 271–4.

36 The motif of the crabs and the candles seems to have circulated widely; it has been attributed to actual practice. The English Protestant, Henry More (one of the Cambridge Platonists at mid-seventeenth century) believed that ‘medieval priests used to tie candles to the backs of crabs and set them loose in churchyards to simulate the souls of the dead.’ Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 703.

37 Cosquin (ref. two notes above), vol. II, p. 277. See Jean-François Fleury, ‘Jacques le voleur,’ in Littérature orale de la Basse-Normandie (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1883), pp. 167–79. This boy tells his mother he wants to be a thief. She then enters the church to consult the Blessed Virgin and gets her answer in the affirmative from the boy behind the altar impersonating her voice. This little trickster begins his career with the cow stealing trick on the road by hanging himself in two places to lure the attendants away from the animal. Next, he drugs the horsemen and steals their mounts. For a sequel, he steals bread out of a baking oven by drilling a hole at the back. Now the magistrate who has put him up to all the tests wants the sheets stolen from his own bed while he is sleeping. The boy comes up with another distraction at the window, an effigy, which leads the good man to murder. While attending to the ‘body,’ the boy does his work in the bedroom. The next day he turns hares loose in the yard to distract dinner guests and so steals the entire banquet. The final trick is to lure the priest into a sack by playing the angel who leads the curé to ‘paradise.’ This story retains many of the elements familiar from Straparola, pointing to a narrative tradition with considerable stability that circulated throughout Europe for half a millennium. Another was collected by Auguste Dozon, Contes albanais (Paris: Leroux, 1881), ‘Les deux voleurs,’ p. 169. In this tale one of the thieves poses as the angel Gabriel to get the priest into the sack. This was one of the popular features of the folk tradition. In ‘The Gypsy and the Priest,’ from Francis Hindes Groome’s Gypsy Folk Tales, ed. Walter Starkie (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1899; reprint, London: Herbert Jenkins, 1963), no. 12, pp. 46–53, the Turkish gypsies tell of the candles and angel’s clothes used to dupe the clergyman. Once inside, the priest is mercilessly abused by being dragged over rough roads and through thorns. Ultimately he dies and the gypsy makes off with a considerable sum of money. Groome provides five further versions of the tale principally from North and South Wales.

38 Cuentos populares españoles (Madrid: S. Aguirre, 1947), vol. I, pp. 502–5. This is ATU type 1525A. Further post-Straparola versions with one or more of the familiar motifs are to be found in Justin Edouard Mathieu Cénac-Moncaut, Contes populaires de la Gascogne (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861), pp. 99–101; Carolina Coronedi-Berti, Novelle popolari bolognesi (Bologna: A. Forni, 1983), no. 39; and Heinrich Pröhle, ‘Der gelehrige Dieb,’ in Kinder- und Volksmärchen (Leipzig: Avenarius & Mendelssohn, 1853; reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1975), no. 49, pp. 148–57. This tale is a unique collection of the many familiar tricks. The first is to rob a cattleman of his three oxen by making him think the beasts had sunk into the moor. Achieving this, the thief returns to the band of robbers with the first proof of his skill. The second episode is concerned with a merchant’s shop in Hamburg and the fabrics and jewels for the wedding of the king of Morocco to the daughter of the emperor of China. By sundry impersonations and ruses, the thief gets the goods back to the robbers’ cave. By the end he becomes the leader of the gang. For others in ‘the master-thief’ group see Johannes Bolte and Jiří Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1913–37), vol. III, pp. 379–406. Another of this kind was collected by Angelo de Gubernatis, ‘Il ladro,’ in Le novelline di Santo Stefano (Turin: A.F. Negro, 1869), no. 29, pp. 54–5. A clever third son steals a horse, meets up with thieves who attempt to rob him, and ultimately offers to join them to master their trade without the use of violence. His greatest exploit was the robbery of a stagecoach. When he returns home and reports his new skills to his family, he is turned over to the authorities and imprisoned. But he makes his escape and is offered pardon by these same gaming authorities if he can demonstrate his skills. He too steals the peasant’s cattle, then a ring by distracting the household with a puppet, so that from one exploit to the next he at last gains his freedom. There is a story by the same name in Giuseppe Pitrè’s Novelline popolari toscane (Palermo, 1878), no. 41. Laura Gonzenbach collected another as ‘Die Geschichte von Caraseddu’ in her Sicilianische Märchen (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1870), no. 83, vol. II, pp. 142–5.

39 Al-Mas’udi, Muruj al-Dhahab (The meadows of gold: The Abassids), ed. Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone (London: Kegan Paul, 1989), pp. 355–7.

40 Popular Tales and Fictions (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2002), pp. 349–50. He tells another from Tibet, which combines elements of Herodotus and the robbery of the treasury and the severing of the companion’s head with the exploits of the clever thief who first honours and buries by stealth the body of his companion lost in the heist gone wrong, then meets the king’s challenge by getting the princess pregnant. The discovery device employs a motif soon to be seen in the story of Pietro the Fool (III.1) in which all men are called to court to determine the paternity of the princess’s baby. The thief is identified as the father when the child being carried around the room bestows the wreath upon him. The king now has his culprit, but rather than punish him, in admiration of his skills he honours him. This comes from The Bible of Tibet: Tibetan Tales from Indian Sources, trans. by Franz Anton von Schiefner (into German), and by W.R.S. Ralston (into English) (London: Trübner, 1882); the modern edition is edited by C.A.F. Rhys Davids (London: Kegan Paul, 2003), pp. 37–43. See the debate on p. 37 by von Schiefner concerning the Eastern vs. Western claims for the origin of the tale. Despite the presumed Eastern origin, it occurs in Pausanias’s Description of Greece, IX, 37.

41 Inayat Allah, Bahar Danush, or, Garden of Knowledge (the Bahār-i-dānish), trans. Jonathan Scott, 3 vols. (Shrewsbury: J. & W. Eddowes, 1799), vol. II, pp. 225–48.

42 The Histories of Herodotus, ed. George Rawlinson, 2 vols. (London: J.M. Dent, [1910]), bk. II. sect. 121, vol. II, pp. 191ff. W.A. Clouston mentions a parallel tale from antiquity told by Pausanias (IX.37) pertaining to the treasury of Hyrieus in which the thief is swallowed up by the earth. Popular Tales and Fictions (Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, 2002), pp. 335–6.

43 Missing in his version is an articulation of the surviving thief’s need to mourn over, recover, and bury the body of his beheaded companion, even though just such signs are at the foundation of the king’s methods for trapping him. These features are evident in many cognate versions, for it is thought that this story originated in the obligations concerning the burial of the dead such as they are expressed in Sophocles’ Antigone. See also the commentary to ‘The Grateful Dead’ (XI.2) in the present collection.

44 Dolopathos or The King and the Seven Wise Men, trans. Brady B. Gilleland (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1981), pp. 43–50. It also appears in The Seven Sages of Rome (Southern version), ed. Karl Brunner (London: Early English Text Society, Humphrey Milford-Oxford University Press, 1933; reprint, Nendeln: Kraus Reprints, 1971), ll. 1219–1350. Dolopathos was also versified by Herbert as Li romans de Dolopathos, ed. Charles Brunet and Anatole de Montaiglon (Paris: Bibliothèque Elzevirienne, 1856), pp. 215ff, for the current story. For a further study of the clever thieves and the Rhampsinitus tradition see N.M. Penzer, Poison Damsels and other Essays in Folklore and Anthropology (London: Chas. J. Sawyer, 1952), pp. 75–109. The story also made its way early to England via William Painter as ‘The Duke of Venice and Ricciardo,’ in Palace of Pleasure, ed. Joseph Jacobs (London: David Nutt, 1890; reprint, New York: Dover, 1966), vol. II, pp. 8–17. This is Ser Giovanni’s story. A tragedy must have been written on the tale of ‘Bindo and Ricciardo,’ now lost, to which Philippe Henslowe makes reference in his Diary, on March 4 and June 5, 1592. See Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R.A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). Henri Estienne also contributed to its wide circulation through his Traite preparative a l’Apologie pour Herodote, ed. Bénédicte Boudou (Geneva: Droz, [1566], 2007). Henry William Weber recovers the story from a metrical version of the Seven Sages in his Metrical Romances of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: A. Constable, 1810).

45 The Pecorone of Ser Giovanni, trans. W.G. Waters, 3 vols. (London: Privately Printed for Members of the Society of Bibliophiles, 1898), vol. II, pp. 3–34. The story receives an elaborate retelling by Matteo Bandello as ‘Egito la vicenda,’ in Tutte le opere, ed. Francesco Flore (Milan: Mondadori, 1934–5), part I, no. 25, pp. 257–66.

46 Stanslao Prato, ‘La leggenda del tesoro di Rampsinite,’ in Quattro novelline populari livornesi (Bologna: A. Forni, [1976]). Other versions of the tale appear in Giovanni Sercambi, Il novelliere, ed. L. Rossi (Rome: Salerno, [1374], 1974), no. 88; Matteo Boiardo, Orlando innamorato, trans. Charles Stanley Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), bk. II, chaps. 5, 39.

47 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 50–2. This story from Sicily was first collected by Pitrè, no. 159 of his Fiabe, and appears in the English translation of this work, vol. I, pp. 577–9, for which, see the following note. For further traces of this story tradition, see Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 5 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1889–91; or 4 vols. (London: Longman’s Green, 1867–75), vol. II, p. 230. For a comprehensive list of the representions of the Rhampsinitus type in modern folk and literary tales see Johannes Bolte and Jiří Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlag, 1913–32), vol. III, pp. 395–406. One of the curious facts of the Rhampsinitus tale is that it found its way from Egypt through Herodotus back to the East where it appears in the Katha sarit sagara of Somadeva as ‘Karpara and Ghata,’ in The Ocean of Streams of Story, ed. N.M. Penzer, trans. C.H. Tawney, 10 vols. (London: Chas. W. Sawyer, 1927), vol. V, pp. 142–51 (the same page numbers in the edition printed in Delhi by Motilal Banarsidass, 1923, 1984). In this version it is a princess who is the treasure, and while one lover (thief) is taken and hanged, the second digs a passage to her apartment, takes her away, and then takes down the body of his friend which the king was using as a means to catch the thief. He continually tricks the guards and gets the body. Somadeva or his source joins the Rhampsinitus opening to a misogynist Kashmirian tale on the treachery of women, for the princess dissuades the second thief from claiming his half of the kingdom as his reward for turning himself in and prevails upon him to flee, only to give herself to a beggar, then kill Ghata her liberator, and in turn betray the beggar for a merchant. Penzer includes a substantial commentary on the probable origins of this story and opines that there are some forty versions surviving from the medieval period beginning in 1150 with The Seven Sages of Rome and Dolopathos. He cites the Middle English version from MS. Cotton Galba E. ix.

48 ‘The Mason and his Son,’ in The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, ed. and trans. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2009), no. 160, vol. I, pp. 580–5. This is a full relation of the Rhampsinitus type in which the builder of the treasury uses his inside knowledge of the architecture to steal from the king, aided in the exploit by his son until, becoming mired in pitch, the father must be beheaded to prevent identification. The story is retold from Pitrè by Thomas Crane in Italian Popular Tales (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), pp. 163–7. Carolina Coronedi-Berti,‘La fola dla bêla Filadora,’ in Favole bolognesi (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1883; reprint, Bologna: Forni, 1981), no. 14, pp. 54–8. Domenico Comparetti, ‘Crich e Croch,’ in Novelline popolari italiane (Rome: E. Loescher, 1875), no. 13, pp. 52–4. For readers particularly interested in the story type and its European-wide circulation in folk literature, consult W.A. Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2002), pp. 338–49, where versions may be found from Greece, Albania, Brittany, Scotland, Holland, the Tyrol, Denmark, Russia, and Kabaïl in North Africa.

49 ‘The Two Thieves,’ in Francis Hindes Groome, Gypsy Folk-Tales (London: David Nutt, 1899), pp. 41–6. This story derives from Barbu Constantinescu, ‘îl diu coir,’ in Probe de Limbu si Literatura Tiganilor din Romania (Bucherest, 1878), no. 6, pp. 79–87. See also Rudolf von Sowa, ‘O rom th-o rasai,’ in Die Mundart den slovakischen Zigeuner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1877), no. 8, pp. 174ff. The story of one thief getting away with the trousers of the other is known from as far away as Kashmir. See J. Hinton Knowles, Folk-tales of Kashmir (London: Trübner, 1888), p. 111. The story in combined form is also known in Scandinavia, as in the old Swedish fifteenth-century version recorded by G.A. Aberg, Nyländska Folksagor, 2 vols. (Helsinki: Nylandska Afdelningen, 1887), in which the student who steals the body from the gibbet manages to dress the twelve drunken guards in priest’s cassocks. See Norman Mosley Penzer, Poison Damsels and Other Essays in Folklore and Anthropology (London: C.J. Sawyer, 1952), pp. 126–8; new edition (London: Kegan Paul, 2002).

50 J.F. Campbell, ‘The Son of the Scottish Yeoman Who Stole the Bishop’s Horse and Daughter, and the Bishop Himself,’ in Popular Tales of the West Highlands (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1994), no. 40, vol. II, pp. 18–38; Campbell, in his annotations, studies this story in relation to the Norse ‘Master-thief’ tale translated by Dasent in Peter Christian Asbjörnsen’s Tales from the Fjeld (London: Chapman & Hall, 1874). See also Campbell, ‘The Tale of the Shifty Lad, the Widow’s Son,’ no. 17d, vol. I, pp. 351–78. This second version has many variants with elements unlike those in Herodotus, but similar to those in ‘The Master-thief,’ revealing yet again a conflation of the two story types. The mother of the Lad becomes reconciled to his life of thievery and promises to have him trained by the Black Rogue. So the boy is sent on several trial missions in which he succeeds brilliantly. He finds his advantages by outwitting his own teacher and ultimately tricks him into submitting himself to a trial hanging which the Lad turns into a real one. The final episode, that of breaking into the king’s storehouse, returns to the Herodotus type. The Shifty Lad puts his master in ahead of himself who then becomes mired in the pitch. The Lad steals his body from the gallows by getting the watch drunk on whiskey. Then he must avoid all the techniques employed by the king to trap him, until a banquet is called, at which the Lad makes use of the princess’s ink to mark twenty bystanders so that he could not be singled out. Finally, by confession, he wins the princess, yet makes a final mistake while being suspended over a wall in a ‘pocket napkin,’ for the princess, being startled, turns loose; he dashes out his brains and leaves her a widow. Yet another version combining the sheep robbing on the road with an attempt on the king’s treasury is found in ‘Voleur par nature,’ in Contes grecs, collected by Émile Legrand, Recueil de contes populaires grecs (Paris: Leroux, 1881), p. 205. ‘Le voleur avisé’ (The wise thief) is one of many compound versions of the story in Brittany, this one beginning with ‘the master-thief’ who issues from a poor household to learn his trade and in the process frightens off a band of thieves who leave behind their ‘disappearing’ cap and ‘levitating’ coat, with which implements the protagonist becomes rich. The stories join when he includes his poor father in a second attempt at robbing the king’s treasury. The rest of the story deals with the exposure of the headless body and the many ruses he must practice to cover his sister’s cries, then steal the body by getting monks drunk to appropriate their habits to dress the soldiers guarding it – all in rather fanciful ways. More episodes follow, including the marking of many more doors than his own with white crosses, until at last he becomes king.

51 ‘The Brahmin and His Goat,’ in The Panchatantra, trans. Chandra Rajan (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), bk. III, no. 4, p. 298.

52 Marc Wolterbeek, ‘Unibos: The Earliest Full-Length Fabliau (Text and Translation),’ Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (1985), pp. 46–76. See also the commentary by Jan M. Ziolkowski in Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 128–52, and his translation of the tale, pp. 264–85. Ziolkowski states that this folk tale ‘is certainly the oldest expression of a tale type that is attested in hundreds of versions throughout the world, especially in Europe and particularly in Belgium and the Netherlands,’ p. 130. It was also undoubtedly collected from the folk for literary elaboration in Latin by a cleric.

53 Symeon Sethi, Specimen sapientiae indorum veterum (Berlin: Johann Michael Rüdiger, 1697). The Directorium vitae humanae, alias parabola antiquorum sapientum, ed. Joseph Derenbourg was published in Paris by F. Vieweg in 1887, although the work dates to the twelfth century and was first printed in Strasbourg in 1488. The story was not passed on to the Italian edition, trans. Anton Francesco Doni as the Filosofia morale (Venice: Marcolini, 1552), or to the English Moral Philosophy of Doni, trans. Thomas North (1570), ed. Donald Beecher, John Butler, and Carmine di Biase (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2003).

54 Marcolphus famously asks King Solomon to let him choose the tree upon which he is to be hanged and with the king’s permission leads his army all over the known world without ever finding one to his satisfaction. The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus, ed. Donald Beecher (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1995), p. 199.

55 Hitopadesa of Narayana, trans. M.R. Kale, 6th ed. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1967), chap. 4, fable 9, p. 112. It also appears as ‘The Brahmin, The Goat and the Rogues,’ in the Katha sarit sagara (Ocean of the streams of story) of Somadeva, trans. C.H. Tawney (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1992), vol. II, pp. 68–9; in the ten-volume edition, The Ocean of Story, ed. N.M. Penzer, trans. C.H. Tawney (Delhi: M. Banarsidas, [1923], 1984), vol. V, p. 104. For a version drawn from the Hitopadesa, see ‘The Story of the Brahman and the Goat,’ in The Book of Good Counsels: From the Sanskrit of the Hitopadesa, ed. Edwin Arnold (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1924), p. 131; and ‘The Story of the Camel, the Lion, and his Court,’ pp. 132–4. See also the Hitopadésa ou l’instruction utile, trans. Édouard Lancereau (Paris: p. Jannet, 1855), p. 192. Lancereau thought the story arrived in Europe through the Anwari-i Souhaili, or any of the related versions of the celebrated ‘Fables of Bidpai’ or ‘Pilpay,’ but the early medieval references to this work, translated as the Livre des Lumières, seem earlier. Husayn Va’iz U’l-Kashifi translated the ‘Fables of Pilpay’ in Persian as the Anvar-i Suhaili. See ‘Of the thieves who by persisting in one story persuaded the Devotee that his Sheep was a Dog,’ in The Lights of Canopus, trans. Edward B. Eastwick (Hertford: Stephen Austin, 1854), chap. 4, no. 7, pp. 331–5.

56 Les contes moralisés de Nicole Borzon, ed. Lucy T. Smith (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot, 1889; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprints, 1968), no. 132, p. 135. But by all appearances, the motif was in Europe much earlier. Köhler in the journal Orient und Occident, a quarterly published in Göttingen from 1860–6, describes a Latin poem dating to the tenth or eleventh century which contains all the essential motifs, vol. 2 (1863), pp. 486ff. The bull of a poor peasant dies, forcing him to sell the hide. On the way home, however, he finds a treasure. He borrows a bushel basket to count his money and is accused of theft. He then reports that hides were selling well and with that tempts three of the richest in the village to slay their bulls, only to be disappointed with the returns. They return in anger, but are induced to buy a trumpet that brings back the dead to life and, in a third episode, a mare that makes money. In the end, the hero is enclosed in a barrel and left beside the sea while the dupes go to a tavern. He cries out that he doesn’t wish to become ‘provost’ and a swine-keeper takes his place. This story may be very close to the European oikotype, featuring both the one-ox motif and the escape from drowning, along with the ‘miraculous’ objects fraudulently sold at high prices.

57 Jacques de Vitry, The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares (London: David Nutt for the Folk-Lore Society, 1890; reprint, n.p.: Kessinger Publications, 2008), no. 20.1, p. 141.

58 A work first published in Basel in 1484 and last published in Antwerp in 1627. See ‘De rustico et agno’ in Thomas Wright, A Selection of Latin Stories from Manuscripts of the 13th and 14th Centuries (London: Percy Society, 1842; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprints, 1965), p. 29. This was taken from the British Library MS. Arundel, no. 506, fol. 46v. In this account a rustic heads to market with his lamb but is brought to confusion by six mercenaries who convince him that it is a dog; it is very similar to the story in de Vitry.

59 Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, ed. Albert Lecoy de La Marche (Paris: Société de l’histoire de France, 1877), pp. 287, 339. The story is also retold in the fabliau, ‘Les trois larrons,’ in Fabliaux ou contes du 12e et 13e siècle, ed. Pierre Jean Baptiste Le Grand d’Aussy (Paris: n.p., 1781), vol. III, p. 1.

60 The Decameron, trans. Edward Hutton (New York: Heritage Press, 1940), pp. 441–4. Others who follow Boccaccio in using this ploy to deceive healthy persons by playing upon their hypochondria include Poggio Bracciolini in no. 268 of his Facetiarum liber, dating to 1420, in which the man is not only convinced of his malady, but is induced to climb into his coffin and be carried towards his own burial. ‘Le mort qui parle,’ in Les Facéties de Pogge Florentin, ed. Pierre des Brandes (Paris: Garnier, 1900), vol. II, p. 223. The same anecdote is told in the Gesta romanorum, ed. Wynnard Hooper, trans. Charles Swan (London: Bohn Library, 1876; reprint, New York: Dover, 1959), no. 132, pp. 236–7, in which three physicians seek to destroy a younger rival by convincing him that he has leprosy, a potentially diabolical trick in light of the Hippocratic adage that he who fears leprosy may infect himself simply through the powers of the imagination. The story figures, as well, among the Fabeln of Hans Sachs, ‘Der schwanger Pauer’ (The pregnant farmer), or ‘Die Kranckheit Kalandrin, der ein Kind drüeg’ (Calendrino’s sickness, who was expecting a child), in Sämtliche Fabeln und Schwänke, ed. Edmund Goetze (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1913), vol. I, pp. 234–7, and Claude Du Moulinet (comedian), Facétieux devis et plaisans contes (Paris, 1612; reprint, Paris: Techener, 1829), p. 88. The Sachs story is clearly based on Boccaccio’s Decameron, IX.3. It begins when three jokesters pass in front of the fool’s door, tell him he looks ill and in a fever. Thereafter he takes to his bed, a doctor is called in who is willing to play along with the prank, and the fool begins to spend great sums of money for medications. It also appears as an anonymous Fastnachtsspiel entitled Der Karg Kalendrus, ‘Bocacius dut uns für halten,’ March 1549. See also Johann Gottlieb Büsching, Volkssagen, Märchen und Legenden (Leipzig: C.H. Reclam, 1812; reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1969), part I, p. 296.

61 A Pleasant Vintage of Till Eulenspiegel, trans. (from the 1515 edition) Paul Oppenheimer (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), pp. 169–71. A peasant is cheated of his cloth and sheets in the same manner in Le Sieur Du Moulinet’s Facétieux devis et plaisans contes (Paris, 1612).

62 Ed. Albino Zenatti (Bologna: Presso Gaetano Romagnoli, 1884), pp. 3–29, and trans. Jan Ziolkowski in Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 285–95. A story closely related to this one is part of the Nachtbüchlein of Valentin Schumann (Eine schöne Historia, 1559), ed. Johannes Bolte (Hildesheim: Olms, 1976).

63 Teofilo Folengo, Baldus, ed. E. Faccioli (Turin: Einaudi, 1989); Baldo, trans. Anne E. Mullaney (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), bks. 8–9, vol. I, pp. 247–327.

64 The trick of the blood-filled bladder originates in Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon, trans. S. Gaselee, Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. B.P. Reardon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 219. Leucippe is to undergo a mock sacrifice to deceive the robbers by being stabbed with a sword that retreats into the sheaf, the point alone breaking a bladder of blood hidden under her robes.

65 Giulio Cesare Croce, Le sottilissime astutie de Bertoldo (Milan: Mursia, 1973), pp. 69–79.

66 (Paris, ca. 1612). In this telling, a peasant is deprived of his linen.

67 In Johannes Bolte and Jiří Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, 5 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1992–4), vol. II, p. 9

68 Emmanuel Cosquin, Contes Populaires de Lorraine, 2 vols. (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1886), vol. I, pp. 108–11. In his ‘Remarques’ to this story, Cosquin cites several other folk sources from across Europe and as far as Afghanistan, India, and the Antilles. In his own collection there is ‘Richedeau,’ vol. I, pp. 223–31, in which a poor man leads his seigneur to believe he had become rich by selling his cow at market hair by hair, causing the lord to slaughter his entire flock, only to meet disillusionment. There follows the sequence of fraudulent wonder gadgets, including the one by which Richedeau’s wife is ostensibly resuscitated. The funeral of the lord’s wife provides the occasion for the hero to escape by trading places with a shepherd whose flock he later claims to have come from under the water. Among the many others is Angelo De Gubernatis’s ‘I due furbi e lo scemo,’ in the Novelline di Santo Stefano (Turin: A.F. Negro, 1869), no. 30, pp. 55–7. When two thieves go to visit their brother, he sells them a ‘self-cooking’ pot. This is the beginning of a series of tricks by which he puts off their rage for the failure of each ‘miraculous’ object. The second is the blood-bladder and false murder trick involving a magic whistle. After the furbi slay their wives they are back for revenge, but fall for the horse primed to defecate gold coins. The final episode is the sack and drowning, which is averted by the victim’s lament that he doesn’t wish to become pope. A passing shepherd exchanges places with him and the ‘new shepherd’ lures his brothers into sacks of their own to find sheep at the bottom of the river. The similarity to Straparola is remarkable. Another with correspondences to the Lorraine version was collected by J.-M. Luzel for his Contes Bretons (Quimperlé, 1870), p. 85; it reappears in his Contes populaires de la Basse Bretagne (Paris: C.P. Maisonneuve and Larose, [1887] 1967), vol. III, pp. 414–26. Paul Sébillot knew of several further versions in France. In a tale from the Auvergne, the boy taken for an idiot shows his cunning in reversing his mother’s oath that he would never ‘take the wolf by the tail.’ This he manages by catching one backing down a tree. They dress the beast in a sheep’s hide and sell it to shepherds. When the wolf follows its nature among the flocks, the contest begins when the shepherds come back in anger. First Touéno-Bouéno sells them a whistle after whistling his old mother back to life in a planned trick. The three shepherds then hatchet their wives to death. Enraged, they return with a sack, but the boy makes his escape by trading places with a beggar desirous of becoming a bishop. ‘Touéno-Bouéno,’ in Littérature orale de l’Auvergne (1891) (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve and Larouse, n.d.), no. 7, pp. 69–80, in the series Les littératures populaires de toutes les nations, vol. 35. Very similar is the tale collected by Justin Cénac-Moncaut, ‘Le juste et la raison,’ in Contes populaires de la Gascogne (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861), p. 175. See also Jean-François Fleury, Littérature orale de la Basse-Normandie (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve, 1883), pp. 179ff. This trickster also gets his start by pulling a wolf by the tail and selling it to shepherds. The resuscitation object is a knife and the man he tricks into the sack is a pig farmer who wants to marry a princess. The story is also told in Norway, collected there by Eugène Beauvois, Contes de la Norvège, de la Finlande, et de la Bourgogne (Paris: E. Dentu, 1862), p. 218.

69 This story is derived from Albino Zenatti’s Storia del Campriano contadino (Bologna, 1884), pp. 3–29, in which a verse version published in 1572 is also cited. Italian Popular Tales, trans. Thomas Crane (London: Macmillan, 1885), pp. 303–9; Vittorio Imbriani, ‘Le tre fornarine,’ in Novellaja milanese (Milan: Rizzoli, [1871], 1976), no. 23, pp. 290–7, and no. 47, pp. 587–92 (this is the same story collected by Nerucci, see below, and footnote 73); Giuseppe Pitrè, Fiabe, novelle e racconti populari siciliani, 4 vols. (Palermo: Pedone-Lauriel, 1875), vol. III, pp. 194–9, and vol. I, p. 157, included in William A. Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions, vol. II, p. 421, as well as in Isaia Visentini, Le 50 fiabe manatovane (Parma: Astrea, [1879], 1993), no. 13. To this may be added ‘Los dos compadres’ collected in Spain by Aurelio M. Espinosa in Cuentos populares españoles, 3 vols. (Madrid: S. Aguirre, 1947), vol. I, pp. 437–43, and his commentary, vol. III, pp. 151–62. The story has been collected in nearly every region of Europe as well as throughout the world, including those from Italy by Laura Gonzenbach, nos. 70 (in which the resuscitating instrument is a guitar) and 71 (in which there is the gold-pooping donkey, the pot, and a rabbit that does chores like Straparola’s goat); Nerucci, ‘Manfane, Tanfane e Zufilo,’ in Sessanta novelle, ed. Roberto Fedi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), pp. 218–22 (see below); Gottfried Keller, Die Märchen (Jena: Diedrichs, [1931]), pp. 85–95; Karl Müllenhoff, Sagen, Märchen und Lieder der Herzogthümer Schleswig, Holstein und Lauenberg (Kiel: Schwerssche Buch, 1845), pp. 457–63; Felix Bobertag, Geschichte des Romans, 2 vols. (Breslau, 1876–84), vol. I, pp. 160–4; and Ulrich Jahn, Schwänke und Schnurren aus Bauern Mund (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1889), pp. 125–39. In the version collected by Campbell in the West Highlands, ‘The Three Widows,’ each widow has a son, but the two elder boys gang up on the younger and kill his cattle, so he pretends to sell the hides. After catching and selling an ordinary bird for a good price as a divinatory creature, he convinces the brothers that the money came from the hides, inducing them to kill their own cattle and make fools of themselves. In revenge they kill the boy’s mother. He uses her body, strategically placed by a well, to extort money from a man who accidentally pushes her in, and so the two elder boys kill their own mothers in expectant imitation. Deceived again, they place the younger one in a barrel to drown him, but a gullible shepherd changes places with him. Now with his new flock of sheep, the younger son convinces the two older ones to try their luck in similar barrels and thus he becomes the lone survivor in possession of all. Campbell made a guess that this tale was based directly on Straparola whose work may have found its way to Scotland shortly after its publication through associates of David Rizzio, who died in 1567. ‘The Three Widows,’ in Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1994), no. 39, vol. II, pp. 1–17; in the four-volume edition: (London: Edmonston & Douglas, 1860), no. 39, vol. II, pp. 218–38. See also The Royal Hibernian Tales (Dublin: n.p., n.d.), p. 61.

70 The tale of the rabbit sent on a mission with money in a purse attached to its neck is of ancient standing. It was known at least as far back as the twelfth century in several sources, including ‘De simplicitate hominum de Willebege,’ from British Library MS. Arundel no. 292, fol. 14, most readily found in Thomas Wright, A Selection of Latin Stories from Manuscripts of the 13th and 14th Centuries (London: Percy Society, 1842), no. 93, p. 80; the twelfth-century The Merry Tales of the Wise Men of Gotham, who attach their rent money to a hare and send it to Newark via Leicester, etc., ed. J.O. Halliwell (London: John Russell Smith, 1840), pp. 14–15; and Odo of Chariton (ca. 1185–ca. 1247), ‘Direct Simplicity in Paying One’s Debts,’in The Fables, ed. John C. Jacobs (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), no. 62, p. 117–18. Certain foolish men from Wilby, facing their taxation deadline, choose the hare to get the money delivered on time because of its rapidity afoot. Straparola’s goat is a variation on the animal that scampers or ambles into the wild and disappears, but now as a prepared trick to dupe the robbers.

71 Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), no. 82, pp. 298–300.

72 There is an amusing variation on the motif in Folktales of the Jews, ed. Dan Ben-Amos, entitled ‘Froyim Greidinger Revives the Dead’ in which all the tricks are played against the Gentiles, luring the last one to replace the hero in a crate, telling him in Ukrainian that he would become the king. Tales from Eastern Europe (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2007), no. 65, vol. 2, pp. 459–60. The tale is also known in Scandinavia; see Peter Christen Asbjörnsen, Tales from the Fjeld, trans. George Webb Dasent (London: Chapman & Hall, 1874), p. 94, in which there is a resurrecting bagpipe and a self-boiling pot. In the Siberian version, Eshigældi recovers his stolen resources by tricking three brothers repeatedly until they decide to kill him. He then changes places with a rich man who is drowned in his place and the hero returns to lure the brothers to their deaths. Vasilii Vasilevich Radloff, Proben der Volkslitteratur der türkischen stämme Süd-Sibiriens (Saint-Petersburg: Akademii nauk, 1866), vol. III, p. 332. Yet another is to be found in S.S. Thorburn, Bannú, or our Afghan Frontier (London: Trübner, 1876), p. 115, and still another in Lo Rondallayre, quentos populars catalans, ed. Francisco Maspons y Lebros (Barcelona, 1875), vol. II, p. 82, in which the hero cries from inside the sack that he doesn’t want to become king. Finally, it was told by the Basques in a story entitled ‘Le curé joué’ (The tricked priest) which begins with the hare that delivers messages, the priest deceived because there were in fact two. The Basque flute is used to resuscitate the woman rigged up with the bladder of blood. The priest (curé), deceived a second time, returns with a sack to throw Petarillo into the sea. When the boy complains about having to marry a princess, a passing shepherd volunteers to take his place. Impressed by Petarillo’s new flock, the priest seeks his own at the bottom of the sea. Wentworth Webster, Basque Legends (London: Griffith & Farran, 1877), consulted in Légendes basques, trans. Nicolas Burguete ([Anglet]: Aubéron, 2005), pp. 214–17.

73 Gherardo Nerucci, Sessanta novelle popolari montalesi, ed. Roberto Fedi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), no. 21, pp. 205–10.

74 The story may be found in Fairy Tales, ed. Jackie Wullschlager, trans. Tina Nunnally (New York: Viking, 2005), but comes originally from Fairy Tales Told for Children, 1837, trans. by H.W. Dulcken as Stories for the Household (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1888), pp. 24–33. Straparola’s story of Scarpacifico was translated into Danish in 1818 by Johann Christian Riise, which may have influenced Andersen through his father; see Jan Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 159. For the story of ‘Little Fairly,’ which is quite like Straparola’s tale in significant ways, see Samuel Lover, Legends and Stories of Ireland (London: Chapman & Hall [185-]), reprinted in Clouston’s Popular Tales and Fictions, vol. II, p. 402. See also J.F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 4 vols. (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1890; reprint, Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1969), vol. II, p. 229, also in Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions, vol. II, p. 417. Other Germanic versions include those in J.G. Büsching, ‘Peasant Kibbitz,’ in Volks-Sagen, Märchen und Legenden (Leipzig: C.H. Reclam, 1812; reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1969), p. 296, trans. in Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions, vol. II, p. 413; Max Müller, ‘Master Thief,’ in Chips from a German Workshop, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1867–75), vol. II, p. 232; Heinrich Stahl (pseudonym for Jodocus Temme), in Mitternachtblatt für gebildete Stände (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg, 1829), nos. 35, 36, and Heinrich Pröhle, ‘Der bunte Bauer,’ in Märchen für die Jugend (Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1854), no. 15, pp. 55–61. This story offers its own tricks put upon the villagers and concludes with the sack, the distraction, and the return of the hero. On this group of tales, see Jan Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales, pp. 156–61. Finally, the tale was also known to the gypsies in a form that combines ‘the master-thief’ type of the previous story (I.2) and ‘The Little Peasant’ of the Brothers Grimm. See Francis Hindes Groome, ‘Jack the Robber’ and ‘The Fool with the Sheep,’ in Gypsy Folk Tales, ed. Walter Starkie (London: Herbert Jenkins, [1889], 1963), nos. 68 and 69. These stories are separate treatments of elements already assembled in Straparola. In the first, the gypsy boy and his mother play the blood-bladder trick on ‘the master.’ He purchases the enchanted stick with which the gypsy mother was returned to life, then kills not only his wife, but the servant girl and his waggoner, whose heads he literally cudgels with the stick to bring them back to life. In the second story, the rogue is put in a sack and remains there until a drover happens along who is willing to leave his herds and exchange places upon the promise of going directly to heaven. Three years go by before the master meets the boy and his herd, hears the tall tale, and asks to be chucked into the same river in search of another herd of cattle.

75 The Complete Stories of the Brothers Grimm, no. 61; ‘The Little Farmer,’ in Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales (Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday, n.d.), no. 4, pp. 13–17. The Grimm brothers knew the ‘Unibos’ fabliau directly, for they published the edition princeps in Lateinische Gedichte des X. und XI. Jahrhunderts in collaboration with Andreas Schmeller.

76 One of the earliest versions of this inset tale is the old German poem Der Kündige Knecht, Viennese MS. 428, no. 62.

77 Icelandic Legends, ed. Jón Arnason, trans. George E.J. Powell and Eiríkur Magnússon (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1866), pp. 606–9.

78 Trans. Leonard C. Smithers (London: H.S. Nichols, 1893), pp. 238–57. Thomas-Simon Gueullette, Les mille et un quart-d’heure, contes tartares, 3 vols. (Paris, 1753), no. 106, vol. III, p. 202. This work was translated shortly thereafter by Thomas Flloyd as Tartarian Tales, or A Thousand and One Quarters of Hours (London: J. & R. Tonson, 1759).

79 The story tradition also remained current in the East, perhaps in some places influenced by Western elements. In the Santal folk tale, ‘The Story of Bitaram,’ the hero employs the trick of the gold coin left in the bottom of the counting basket to induce the king and his sons to kill their cattle in order to sell the hides. This trick was employed in many of the ‘puss in boots’ analogues in order to convince the court that the cat’s ward was a rich nobleman (see the commentary to XI.1). This story ends with the sack episode and the hero’s escape when the sons leave the sack unattended to cook their food. The animals herded by the new victim were cows and buffaloes. That this version told by the Santals of India so closely resembles certain of the European stories outlined above testifies further to the complex dissemination of these tales. ‘The Story of Bitaram,’ in Santal Folk-tales, trans. Andrew Campbell (Pokhuna [Pokhara]: Santal Mission Press, 1891), pp. 25–32. Another in this same collection, ‘The Greatest Cheat of Seven,’ pp. 98–101, combines ‘master-thief’ elements with ‘little peasant’ elements as the hero induces his victims to burn down their houses to sell the ashes, to purchase a magic fishing rod and a wonderful dog, and to kill their wives, certain they had the means to resuscitate them.

80 One such tale of the merchant who insinuates himself into a forbidden place through the irresistibility of his wares (Motif K139.1.3) is ‘King Gallafro’s Vain Precautions’ in the present collection (IX.1), in which Prince Diego of Castile seduces the queen of Spain by assuming the disguise to gain entry to her tower where the lady was incarcerated by a jealous husband.

81 Further to this, see Claude Roussel, Conter de Geste au XIVe siècle: inspiration folklorique et écriture épique dans La Belle Hélène de Constantinople (Geneva: Droz, 1998), pp. 142–80. All the current theories are treated, whether it is a trace memory of ancient rites concerning the concentration of dynastic power within the family, the harmless expression of a universal subliminal craving, or simply the expression of social inversion (p. 143).

82 Jean Wauquelin, La Belle Hélène de Constantinople, roman en prose (1448), trans. Marie-Claude de Crécy, in Splendeurs de la cour de Bourgogne, ed. Danielle Régnier-Bohler (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995). The matter of papal dispensation is a prominent feature in the version of the story from late medieval Germany entitled, ‘Deu tochter des küniges von Reuzen’ (The daughter of the king of Reuzen) in which the pontiff is bribed with gold and silver. This heroine is then sent all manner of costly gifts and clothes from her father, but when she divines their significance she is distraught, cuts off her hair, throws down the bride’s clothes, and disfigures herself till the blood runs down. She is placed in a boat which takes her to Greece and there in time she finds a royal partner, but is traduced by the evil queen mother; thereafter her story resembles the destiny of the queens in the ‘Biancabella’ (III.3) and ‘Truth-speaking Bird’ (IV.3) cognate stories. Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Gesamtabenteuer: Hundert Altdeutsche Erzälungen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961), vol. II, pp. 595–613.

83 Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

84 This chanson de geste probably originated in northern France and is known from three complete manuscripts and one fragmentary fifteenth-century manuscript. Prose versions are also known, one of them stemming from Jean Wauquelin’s 1448 work for Philippe le Bon.

85 Others for consideration include, ‘De Alixandre, Roy de Hongrie, qui voulut espouser sa fille,’ in Nouvelles françaises inédites du quinzième siècle, ed. Ernest Langlois (Paris: H. Champion, 1908), pp. 61–7. In this version the heroine is put to sea with her ward, having already sought to dissuade her father by severing her hands. The motif also occurs in a fourteenth-century version entitled Fabula romanensis de rege Francorum, cujus nomen reticetur, qui in filia sua adulterium et incestum committere voluit (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1370). See also ‘Ystoria regis franchorum et filie in quo adulterium comitare voluit,’ ed. Hermann Suchier, Romania 39 (1910), pp. 61–76 (fourteenth-century chanson de geste); and Jehan Maillart, Le Roman du Comte d’Anjou (Paris: Champion, [1316], 1931).

86 Giovanni Fiorentino, The Pecorone, trans. W.G. Waters, illus. E.R. Hughes (London: Society of Bibliophiles, 1898), X.1, vol. II, pp. 73–95; Giovanni Fiorentino, The Pecorone, trans. W.G. Waters, illus. E.R. Hughes (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1897), pp. 127–33.

87 Others in that ancient tradition, vacillating between pseudo-history and folk tale, include lines from Der Keiser und der kunige Buoch oder de sogenannte Kaiserchronik (a poem of the twelfth century in 18, 578 lines), here edited by Hans Massmann from 12 complete and 17 incomplete manuscripts (Quedlinburg: Leipzig Basse, 1849), ll. 11, 36 7ff; see also the Istoria de la fiyla del rey d’Ungaria, a work in Catalan of undetermined antiquity, ed. Pasquale Morabito (Reggio Calabria: Mendionali Nuniti, 1974). There is also a Slavonic tale entitled ‘The Miller’s Daughter Becomes Queen,’ in Tales from Twelve Tongues, ed. Henry B. Wilson (London: Burnes & Oates, 1883). These may provide further hints concerning the rise of the Belle Hélène group.

88 Claude Roussel, Conter de geste au XIVe siècle: inspiration folklorique et écriture épique dans La Belle Hélène de Constantinople (Geneva: Droz, 1998), p. 17. The Anglo-Saxon origin of the Offa-Constance legend related to La Belle Hélène has been questioned since the 1930s in favour of folkloric and Eastern origins. See Alexander Haggerty Krappe, ‘The Offa-Constance Legend,’ Anglia 61 (1937), pp. 361–9.

89 Roger of Wendover and Matthew of Paris, Flowers of History: Comprising the History of England from the Descent of the Saxons to A.D. 1235, Formerly Ascribed to Matthew Paris, trans. J.A. Giles (London: H.G. Bohn, 1849; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1968). For the Vitæ duorum Offarum, Matthæi Paris, see Historia major, ed. William Watts (London: A. Mearne, 1684), cited in John Colin Dunlop; History of Prose Fiction, ed. Henry Wilson (New York: Burt Franklin, [1896], 1970), vol. II, p. 169; and Alfred Bradley Gough, The Constance Saga [On the legend contained in the ‘Vita Offæ primæ’ and other MSS. including the Chronicle of N. Triveth] (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1902).

90 Edith Rickert, ‘The Old English Offa Saga,’ Modern Philology 2 (June, 1904), pp. 29–77, and Modern Philology 2 (January, 1905), pp. 321–76. Other important early versions include the seminal, anonymous German romance, Mai und Beaflor, studied by Otto Wächter, Untersuchungen über das Gedicht ‘Mai und Beaflor,’ (Erfurt: Druck von F. Kirchner, 1889). This work is Austro-Bavarian and dates to 1257–9, which the author claims to have found in a prose chronicle, a work rather different from the Life of Offa I, but quite similar to Philippe de Beaumanoir’s La Manekine, trans. Christiane Marchello-Nizia (Paris: Stock-Plus, 1980). In La Manekine, the king is Hungarian and the incestuous marriage is urged by the barons and endorsed by the clergy in the interests of begetting a male heir. His daughter, Joïe, is horrified and cuts off her own hand which falls into the river. The king, outraged because he is unable to marry a mutilated woman, asks to have her burned alive, but she is sent away instead in a ship. She is discovered by and marries the king of Scotland against the queen mother’s will. Again there are falsified letters and orders to have her burned with her son, but manikins are burned in their places and she is set to sea again in the same boat in which she had arrived. The final reunion takes place in Rome and includes both the repentant father and the loving husband, who must first be forgiven for his presumed crimes against his wife. As a byway here, the stories of self-mutilating heroines in order to avoid incest, often by cutting off their own hands or disfiguring themselves in various ways, are also legion. The motif is found in the exempla of Jacques de Vitry, no. 57, which tells of a nun beloved by a prince who was praised for her beautiful eyes, whereupon she tore them out and sent them to the prince saying that she would rather lose her eyes than her soul. Thomas Frederick Crane traces the story back to the Vitae patrum, bk. X, chap. 60, in the Patrologiæ cursus completus … Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: Migne, 1967), vol. 74, p. 148. Étienne de Bourbon, thirteenth century, in his Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), no. 248, tells the story of Richard I, king of England, who provokes the same response from a nun. When he sought to ravish her, she asked what it was that had so moved his passions, and when Richard replied that it was her beautiful eyes, she blinded herself to rescue her virginity. Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues, from an unedited collection of Étienne de Bourbon, ed. A. Lecoy de la Marche (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1876), fifth part, nos. 500 and 248, pp. 431, 211–12.

91 Just how this version of the tale originated and how it came down to Kirchhof is work for other scholars, but other works worth consulting from Oesterley’s annotations will be mentioned following the main entry. ‘Von König Carolo mango eine ware histori’ (Of King Charlemagne, a true story), in Wendunmuth, ed. Hermann Oesterley, 5 vols. (Tübingen: Litterarischen Verein in Stuttgart, 1869), bk. II, no. 23, vol. II, pp. 47–52. Among the many references, Oesterley includes Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum quadruplex, vol. IV. Speculum historiale (Graz: Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt, 1965), [VII, 90]. Nicodemus Frischlini Hildegardis magna: comoedia (Tübingen, 1579), but frequently published thereafter in his Operum poeticorum. Juan de Timoneda, El Patrañuelo, ed. Federico Ruiz Morcuende (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1958), no. 21. Jean Gobi, Scala celi of Joannes Gobbi junior (Ulm, 1480; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), no. 32.

92 On the man, see Ruth Josephine Dean, ‘Nicolas Trevet, historian,’ in Medieval Learning and Literature, Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 328–52. For the text, see ‘The Man of Law’s Tale,’ in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales,’ ed. Margaret Schlauch (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), pp. 151–81; or see ‘The Man of Law’s Tale,’ Chaucer’s Major Poetry, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), pp. 313–33.

93 The episode of the bloody knife placed by the queen in order to incriminate her in the death of her children (a vestige of earlier tales of actual cannibalism on her part [see the notes to IV.3]) is an ancient European folk motif that is associated with a number of accused queen stories. It is not employed by jealous sisters or hostile mothers-in-laws; they resort to substituting animals for newborns and the letter exchange device, also included in this story, as in ‘The Truth-speaking Bird’ (IV.3). Rather this pertains to those tales in which the queen is traduced by a brother-in-law or, as here, by her own father. The motif may be Eastern, for it occurs in the Tooti-nameh, but there are early examples of it in the West, as in La conte de la femme chaste convoitée par son beau-frère, ed. Axel Wallensköld in Acta societatis scientiarum Fennicae 34, no. 1 (Helsinki: Finska Vetenskapssocieteten, 1907). The bloody dagger appears in literary versions of the tale as early as the mid-twelfth century in Crescentia (of Rome), ed. Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen in Gesamtabenteuer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchhgesellschaft [1850], 1961), vol. I, pp. 129–64. It is also known in La bone Florence de Rome, ed. Albert Knobbe (Marburg: Elwert, 1899).

94 John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, and Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1980), pp. 108–36. For a summary of the Chaucer, Gower, and Trivet controversy in relation to this tale, see Margaret Schlauch, Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens (New York: Gordian Press, [1927], 1969), pp. 132–4.

95 The text may be found in Romancing the Goddess: Three Middle English Romances about Women, ed. Marijane Osborn (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). See also The Romance of Emaré, ed. Edith Rickert (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1908).

96 Rappresentazione di santa Uliva, in Alessandro d’Ancona, Sacre rappresentazioni del secoli XIV, XV e XVI (Florence: LeMonnier, 1872), vol. II, pp. 235–315.

97 The Pecorone, trans. W.G. Waters (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1897), pp. 127–33: from Waters’ own copy, no. 5 of 110 printed.

98 Molza’s ‘[Fille du Roi de Bretagne]’ is included in Novellieri del cinquecento (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1971), vol. I, and in Conteurs italiennes de la Renaissance, ed. Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Georges Kempf, and Anne Motte-Gillet (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), pp. 761–80. Others of his novelle came to print in 1549 in Lucca under the title Quattro novelle dell’ onoratissimo Molza.

99 All’ origine della Guerra dei cento anni; una novella Latina di Bartolomeo Facio e il volgarizzamento di Jacopo di Poggio Bracciolini, ed. Gabriella Albanese (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 2000).

100 (Venice: Francesco Sansovino, 1561), pp. 78v–83r (from the copy once belonging to the Pontifici Biblioteca di Bologna).

101 Giovanni Battista Basile, The Pentamerone, trans. Richard Burton (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927, 1928), pp. 150–7.

102 One such was published in Worcester, MA, by Isaiah Thomas, 1787. There were many American as well as British and Scottish printings.

103 Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 378–82.

104 Thomas F. Crane, ‘Fair Wood Maria,’ in Italian Popular Tales, ed. Jack Zipes (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2009). Giuseppe Pitrè collected the story in Tuscany as ‘La donnina di legno’ (The little wooden girl), pointing out in his notes that the story was known throughout Italy. Novelle popolari toscane, parte seconda (Rome: Casa editrice del libro italiano, n.d.), pp. 101–2. The opening of the story is also represented in ‘Il trottolin di legno,’in Le novelline di Santo Stefano, ed. Angelo de Gubernatis (Turin: A.F. Negro, 1869), no. 3, pp. 19–21. A dying woman asks her husband to remarry someone upon whose finger her ring is a perfect fit. After an unsuccessful search, the daughter tries on the ring and is caught doing so, with devastating results. An old woman advises the girl to stall the wedding by making impossible demands – a dress of gold, for example – but with the help of a magician, every demand is met. The girl makes her escape in a wooden ‘trottolin’ which embarks her upon a round of adventures in which she uses her splendid gowns on a series of Cinderella-like occasions remote from the present story. English readers will find the story most readily as ‘Kari Wooden Gown’ in which all the parts are present from the incest opening to the clothes exchange by which a prince is bamboozled and then drawn in by the heroine’s craft and charm. The Red Fairy Book, ed. Andrew Lang (London: Longmans & Co. [1890], 1912), pp. 189–201.

105 Emmanuel Georges Cosquin, Contes populaires de Lorraine, comparés avec les contes des autres provinces de France et des pays étrangers, et précédé d’un essai sur l’origine et la propagation des contes populaires européens (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1886), no. 28, vol. I, pp. 273–80. Cosquin provides a check list of cognate versions, several of which have already been included. But in general, his tales are those in which there is a long romance sequel of the ‘Peau d’Âne’ (Donkey skin) variety, which does not appear in Straparola. Others resembling Straparola’s in pronounced ways are the versions recorded by Bernhard Schmidt, ‘Der Drache,’ in Griechische Märchen, Sagen und Volkslieder (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1877), no. 12, pp. 93–8, and by Eugen Prym and Albert Socin, Der neu-aramæische Dialekt des Tûr ’Abdin (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1881), no. 52 (121), vol. I, pp. 145–9, with a translation in the second volume. In the latter, the heroine, a Jewish merchant’s daughter besieged, emerges from her transported coffer to make coffee and is caught by the prince. She tells her story and he marries her.

106 Fireside Tales of Ireland (Dublin: McGlashan & Gill, 1870), pp. 81–7; new ed. (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1975).

107 J.F. Campbell, ‘The King Who Wished to Marry his Daughter,’ in Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Orally Collected (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1890; reprint, Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1994), no. 14, vol. I, pp. 269–77. This is a charming adaptation of the fairy tale to the conditions of the highlands, where the girl meets the king’s son in church with her various gowns on, and whose shoe left behind is the means for finding her as the dirty serving wench – the girl whom the king has vowed to marry because the shoe fits her alone. An incestuous father launches this version as well because only his daughter fitted perfectly into his deceased wife’s clothes. Campbell also reports other versions such as the one on the island of South Uist in 1859, from his companion, who had gotten it from a girl at the inn at the Sound of Benbecula, etc. (vol. I, pp. 273–4). He then mentions ‘Peau d’Âne,’ ‘Katie Wooden Cloak,’ ‘Finette Cendron’ by the Contesse d’Aulnoy, and the present tale by Straparola. To this list may be added ‘La fille du roi d’Espagne’ (The king of Spain’s daughter), collected by Luzel for his Contes populaires de la Basse-Bretgne. This heroine is chosen to replace her mother in her father’s bed, which forces the girl to consult with an old woman who sets up the delay tactics in terms of sartorial demands. The girl flees with her dresses, takes service as a pig keeper, and there, through a series of up-class, down-class, clothes shifting, she mystifies then wins the young master. (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1996), vol. III, pp. 175–83.

108 Three further versions appear as ‘Maria di legno,’ in Roman Legends: A Collection of the Fables and Folk-lore of Rome, ed. R.H. Busk (Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1877), pp. 66–90. These were collected in Rome in the late nineteenth century. In the first version, the devil himself is the undesirable suitor and a fairy aids the princess in delaying his advances and making her escape with the three traditional dresses and a wooden disguise. In the third version, the recalcitrant daughter, refusing her incestuously minded father, is first imprisoned in a tower, and then abandoned in a chest in the middle of a forest where she is recovered by a prince. Nearly all the conventional motifs of baking the ring into a cake or putting it into a broth are represented as well. They bear all the essential markers of the story type, clearly in wide circulation throughout Italy.

109 Sebastiano Lo Nigro, Racconti popolari siciliani: Classificazione e bibliografia (Florence: Leo Olschki, 1957), pp. 140–1. Laura Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Märchen (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1870; reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1976), no. 24. Further to this motif, Thomson, Motif Index S 12, K 2117, see Johannes Bolte and Jiří Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm (Leipzig: Dietrich, 1913–18, 1932), vol. I, pp. 298ff, and Aurelio M. Espinosa, Cuentos populares españoles (Madrid: S. Aguirre, 1947), vol. II, p. 376. Yet another was collected by Auguste Dozon: ‘Les souliers,’ in Contes albanais (Paris: Ernest Laroux, 1881), no. 6, pp. 41–8. In this tale, the dying wife specifies shoes, which only her daughter can fill. This girl plays along with her father’s incestuous proposal until she can escape hidden inside of a grand chandelier. It is purchased, to be sure, by a prince, whose food she mysteriously consumes in the middle of the night like a ‘phantom lady.’ Once discovered, the prince is charmed, yet must leave for a year, urging her to resume her hiding place in his absence. She is caught, however, by the mother of the prince’s fiancée, who arranges to have the girl thrown into a briar patch – well, ‘nettles.’ She is rediscovered by hiding her wedding ring under a plate of vegetables she made up for the prince’s table.

110 The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, ed. and trans. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2009), vol. I, pp. 619–22. In this version it is the husband’s apprentice who makes the bet with his master who says to him as he hides in the chest, ‘And you who are there inside, You can hear the whole story, So give me the money and the mule.’ See also, The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, vol. II, p. 916. The second Sicilian version was published by Pitrè: ‘Li trii brinnisi’ (The three toasts), in Otto fiabe e novelle siciliane raccolte dalla bocca del popolo (Bologna: Fava & Garagnani, 1873). The Venetian version, entitled ‘La mugier d’un pescaor’ (The fisherman’s wife), was collected by Domenico Giuseppe Bernoni in Fiabe e novelle popolari veneziane (Venice: Fontana-Ottolini, 1873), pp. 33–6; new ed. (Venice: Filippi, 1969).

111 Gli Asolani, ed. Carlo Dionisotti (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), bk. I, sect. 12, where Straparola’s ‘disavaglianza’ is echoed by Bembo’s ‘disagguaglianze,’ p. 22, and bk. I, sect. 30, where Bembo speaks of the trials of ‘subita gelosia,’ p. 50.

112 See Corinne Lucas, ‘De la chronique à la nouvelle: l’art de faire taire la faim,’ in La table et ses dessous, ed. Adelin Charles Fiorato and Anna Fontes Baratto (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999), pp. 168–9.