1 Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists, ed. Richard Dorson, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), vol. I, pp. 199–200.

2 Andrew Lang, in Peasant Customs and Savage Myths, vol. I, p. 201. Its diffusion is marked by a Zulu version reported by Henry Callaway, Nursery Tales, Traditions and Histories of the Zulu (1868; reprint, Nendeln: Kraus Reprints, 1970), pp. 241–8.

3 Friedrich Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop (London: Longmans, 1875), vol. II, p. 46.

4 ‘Pig or Prince? Murat, d’Aulnoy and the Limits of Civilized Masculinity,’ in High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France, ed. Kathleen P. Long (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002), pp. 203–4.

5 For an engaging discussion of the early French fairy tales as free creations in dialogue with related stories, in opposition to the historico-geographical approach of the folklorists and the confinement of these works as extended folk tales, see Ute Heidmann and Jean-Michel Adam, Textualité et intertextualité des contes (Paris: Garnier classique, 2010), esp. pp. 33–80. For the allusion to serial killers, see p. 127.

6 For this tradition, see Barbara Fass Leavy, In Search of the Swan Maiden: A Narration on Folklore and Gender (New York: New York University Press, 1994). ‘The serpent prince’ is ATU type 433.

7 The destruction of the discarded skin is a motif shared with the fox wife stories telling of the mother who can be made to remain at home to bear a man’s children only by finding and destroying her fox skin. This is a wife-taming tale rather than a husband-taming and liberation tale, again closer to the Melusine group. The destruction of the animal skins was the precondition to domestication. Raymond Jameson, Three Lectures on Chinese Folklore (Peking [Beijing]: San Yu, 1932), pp. 94–6. Another complex tale having only this trait in common with Straparola is Anthony Hamilton’s ‘The History of Pertharite and Ferandine’ in which a brother and sister seek to restore their father, the archduke, to sanity. They are transformed into a fox and a crocodile, although Ferandine also appears as a singing fish who by that means gives instructions to the prince on how to rescue her from the enchantment. The Prince and Princess of Lombardy come to their aid using a magic comb and necklace, but initially the prince does not comprehend the urgency of burning Ferandine’s outer crocodile skin. Once burned, Ferandine is far closer to the recovery of her former self, while Pertharite is liberated from his enchantment as a white fox by placing the magic necklace, once an object of fear, around his neck. This story deals with the paradoxical requirement of love in full romantic register between animals and humans, for the princess is in love with the ingratiating fox, and the prince is compelled by his mysterious desire for the sea creature. Select Tales of Count Hamilton, Author of the Life and Memoirs of the Count de Grammont, ‘translated from the French,’ 2 vols. (London: J. Burd, 1760), vol. I, pp. 33–117.

8 Suzanne Magnanini, Fairy-Tale Science: Monstrous Generation in the Tales of Straparola and Basile (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 96–104.

9 Magnanini, Fairy-Tale Science, pp. 112–16. See also Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 53–75.

10 Vişņu Śarma, hereafter Vishnu Sarma, The Panchatantra, trans. Chandra Rajan (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 159; Auguste Loiseleur Deslongchamps, Essai sur les fables indiennes et sur leur introduction en Europe (Paris: Techener, 1838), p. 39.

11 See the ‘Introduction’ to Sir Thomas North, trans., The Moral Philosophy of Doni Popularly Known as The Fables of Bidpai, ed. Donald Beecher et al. (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2003).

12 From Le trône enchanté, conte indien traduit du persan, trans. Daniel Lescallier (New York: J. Desnoues, 1817), vol. I, pp. 4ff.

13 Trans. Franklin Edgerton, 2 vols., Harvard Oriental Series 26–7 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), vol. I, pp. 263–6. The story is more readily available in Simhasana Dvatrimsika: Thirty-two Tales of the Throne of Vikramaditya, trans. A.N.D. Haksar (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998), pp. 181–4.

14 Jan M. Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 219–20.

15 It may be mentioned in passing that the story survived into modern times in the East as well as in the West. One such was collected by Maive Stokes: ‘The Monkey Prince,’ in Indian Fairy Tales (London: Ellis & White, 1880), no. 10, pp. 41–50. This version retains all the principal features of the story, including the burning of the monkey’s skin at the end, with the parents invited into the bedroom to witness the transformation. The hero was born a monkey, but he was a true prince inside and could, on occasion, remove his own skin and dress up as a prince. Such details as these, however, suggest that at this juncture, the Eastern makers were now under the spell of the Western fairy tale, including Straparola’s own contribution.

16 Trans. Jan M. Ziolkowski in Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales, pp. 341–50. This work provides a comparative study of the tale in relation to the Sanskrit ‘Vikramaditya’s Birth’ and Grimm’s ‘The Donkey’ on pp. 200–30.

17 Jan M. Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales, pp. 220–5. Ziolkowski is concerned with finding tales that qualify as true fairy tales before the time of Straparola and Basile, and cites the Asinarius as a prime example. Yet disagreement remains whether or not fairy tales can actually be defined independently of the folk tale at any time.

18 Betsy Hearne, Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

19 Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 57–60.

20 An example of the continuity of the tale, despite wide diffusion and diversification, may be demonstrated in a clumsy variant collected by Francis Hindes Groome among the gypsies of Romania. ‘The Snake who became the King’s Son-in-law’ entails many substitutions: a snake for a pig, and a marriage into a royal family as opposed to being born into a royal family. This snake protagonist, raised as a pet, demands the king’s daughter. After many feats, the match is made and the snake consoles his bride by assuring her on their wedding night that things are not as they seem. With that, he flips a somersault and becomes a golden youth. The king sends a man to see how the pair is faring and he returns with a happy report. Many narrative parts are damaged or truncated, but the defining features are evident: marriage to a beast and escape from a spell through the ritual faith implicit in so contrary a union. Gypsy Folk Tales (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1963), no. 7, pp. 21–4.

21 Giovanni Battista Basile, The Pentamerone (II.5), trans. Richard Burton (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), pp. 141–9. A later handling of this tale may be seen in Madame d’Aulnoy’s ‘Serpentin vert,’ in Cabinet des fées, ed. Élisabeth Lemirre (Arles: Picquier Poche, 1994), vol. I, pp. 253–86.

22 Suite des contes nouveaux ou les fées à la mode, 2 vols. (Paris: Théodore Girard, 1698); Contes II, Contes nouveaux ou Les Fées à la mode, ed. Philippe Hourcade and Jacques Barchilon (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1998), pp. 429–71.

23 Quoted from the unpaginated edition of 1699 of her Histoires sublimes et allégoriques in Ute Heidmann and Jean-Michel Adam, Textualité et intertextualité des contes (Paris: Garnier classique, 2010), p. 51. Ute Heidmann seeks, in her discussion surrounding the passage, to deliver Perrault and others from the literary larceny to which De Murat would seem to be confessing in her avowed use of Straparola. But it is really a non-question in the post-humanist world of amplification upon ancient and contemporary texts as the default method of literary ‘work,’ of the kind that Straparola was doing in ‘authoring’ folk tales, and Shakespeare in authoring plays built incontestably upon known and intertextually accessible literary sources. The fact remains, as one famous commentator excusing Shakespeare said, that some authors ‘invade’ those texts with greater transformational genius than others and thereby clear their names. The irony in the case of Straparola is that his value to us may be the greater because he appears to have been content with rather faithful transcriptions of his sources, to the extent that memory, however furnished or fortified, would allow him.

24 Histoires sublimes et allégoriques (Paris: Florentin Delaulne, 1699).

25 Popular Tales, ed. Andrew Lang (New York: Arno Press, 1977), pp. 50–9.

26 Madame Gabrielle de Villeneuve, La jeune ameriquaine et les contes marins, ed. Élisa Biancardi (Paris: Champion, 2008). (The earliest edition of this work was published in The Hague in 1740.)

27 The English version is readily found in Iona and Peter Opie, eds. The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). The French version appeared in Le magasin des enfans, ou dialogues entre une sage gouvernante et plusieurs de ses élèves de la première distinction (London, 1756). The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, ed. Maria Tatar (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), pp. 58–78.

28 The Meanings of Beauty and the Beast: A Handbook (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004). There is also an extensive discussion of the intertextual relationships implicit in Perrault’s La barbe bleue which suggests, among many intriguing interconnections, that the motif of the slain wives locked away in the forbidden room has something in common with the two wives brutally slain by the Pig Prince of the present story. See Heidmann and Adam, Textualité et intertextualité des contes, pp. 126–8. The motives of the two murderers were somewhat different, however, in that Blue Beard was a sadist and enjoyed setting his wives up by piquing their insatiable curiosities, while King Pig was seeking companionship and found himself the object of intended murder. They are quite different stories.

29 Count Antoine Hamilton, ‘Histoire de Pertharite et de Férandine,’ in Contes: Avec la suite des Facardins (Paris: A.A. Renouard, 1820), vol. I, p. 72. Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1857), no. 108; ‘Hans My Hedgehog,’ in Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales (Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday, n.d.), no. 155, pp. 484–8. A further exploration of this motif in German literature must include Josef Haltrich’s ‘Das Borstenkind’ (The child with bristles), in Deutsche Volksmärchen aus dem Sachsenlande in Siebenbürgen (Hildesheim: Olms [1856], 2007); and Johann Wilhelm Wolf’s ‘Das wilde Schwein’ (The wild boar), in Deutsche Märchen und Sagen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1845).

30 ‘Lu sirpenti’ (The Serpent), in Pitrè, ed., Fiabe, novella e racconti; The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, trans. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo (New York: Routledge, 2009), no. 56, p. 855–6. In his commentary, Pitrè included close analogues collected in Ficarazelli, Montevago, and Noto, while mentioning many others including versions collected by Vittorio Imbriani, La novellaja milanese (Bologna: Fava, 1872), no. 6; ‘Il re porco,’ in Imbriani, La novellaja fiorentini con la novellaja milanese, ed. Italo Sordi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1976), no. 12, pp. 168–82; ‘La fola dèl Rè Purzèl,’ in Carolina Coronedi-Berti, Favole Bolognesi (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1883; reprint, Forni, 1981), no. 10, pp. 34–7; ‘Der Prinz mit der Schweinshaut,’ in Arietti Widter, Georg Widter, and Adam Wolf, eds., Volksmärchen aus Venetien, with ‘Nachweisen’ by Reinhold Köhler (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1866), no. 12. See also ‘Bellindia,’ in Gherardo Nerucci, Sessanta novelle popolari montalesi, ed. Roberto Fedi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), no. 16, pp. 128–33. Yet another version occurs in Rachel Harriette Busk, Roman Legends: A Collection of the Fables and Folk-lore of Rome (Boston: Estes & Lauriet, 1877), pp. 115–18.

31 ‘Prince Scursini,’ in Sicilianische Märchen, intro. Otto Hartwig, ed. Laura Gonzenbach, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1870), no. 42. Giuseppe Pitrè records another version of ‘Il re porco’ in his Novelle popolari toscane parte seconda (Rome: Casa editrice del libro italiano, n.d.), pp. 129–40, with further variants, pp. 140–2. This story features the long quest for the lost husband suppressed in Straparola in which the wife must weep vials of tears. The story follows the familiar order through the death of the first two wives.

32 ‘Maestra,’ in La novellaja fiorentina, ed. Vittorio Imbriani (Leghorn: Francesco Vigo [1871], 1877), p. 168; Imbriani, La novellaja fiorentini con la novellaja milanese, ed. Italo Sordi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1976), no. 21, pp. 271–80.

33 Italian Popular Tales, ed. Thomas Frederick Crane (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2001), pp. 7–11. This story’s affinities are closest to ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ for it is about trespassing in a rose garden and being forced by a monster to give him the eldest daughter in marriage, while her two younger sisters were only too glad to betray her.

34 ‘Sor Fiorante mago,’ in Angelo De Gubernatis, ed., Le novelline di Santo Stefano (Turin: A.F. Negro, 1869), no. 14, pp. 36–7. This is a strange but demonstrable analogue in which three daughters of a woodsman are invited to marry a serpent, only the third of which graciously accepts. The serpent becomes a handsome prince with minimal ado and they live in a fine castle. The girl is forbidden to mention his name, however, but is, like Psyche, enticed to share confidences. The rest of the story is taken up with the trials of her quest involving vials of tears, wearing out iron shoes, and the loss of years in regaining her husband.

35 Andrew Lang, ed., The Red Fairy Book (1890; reprint, London: Longmans & Co., 1912), pp. 104–15. The third daughter of the king discovers her fate when the three girls go snooping in a forbidden room. When the pig comes courting, she marries him, indeed, wipes and kisses his dirty snout by day, but is treated to a transformed prince by night. This story explains the confusion in Straparola, for in attempting to break the spell by tying a string to his foot the princess prolongs it by three years, leading to the long sequel (suppressed in the Piacevoli notti) in which the bride, in Psyche fashion, must seek her husband, walk in iron shoes, climb a ladder of bones, chop off her little finger, and more, assuring a happy ending.

36 ‘The Serpent-Tsarevich and His Two Wives,’ in Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales, ed. R. Nisbet Bain (London: A.H. Bullen, 1902; reprint, Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprints, 1975), pp. 191–200. In this tale, the son of the Tsar is born a serpent, lives in a stone hut, and when grown, asks to be married. The twelfth daughter of an old woman, thought to be too young to meet the prince, begs to go along. She puts on twenty suits of clothes, accepts the prince in marriage, then enters into a clothes-shedding contest with the tsarevich until his last serpent skin is shed and burned. His new human form is to be kept a solemn secret, as in the present tale by Straparola, but she breaks her promise, and again there is a long sequel of expiation and searching not in the present tale. But it is of a very particular kind, being closely related to ‘Fortunio, the King’s Daughter, and the Mermaid’ (III.4). On her journey, she begs for lodging in frightening fairy tale places such as ogres’ castles, but in each instance comes away with a little silver, gold, or diamond apple. When she at last finds her husband, now remarried, she disguises herself as an old woman and displays her precious wares outside his house. These the first wife barters in exchange for closer and longer periods of time with her husband, much as Fortunio’s wife barters her apples to see more and more of her husband’s body, until he is at last freed from the mermaid’s clutches. When the tsarevich discovers his first wife watching over him and comes to understand that the second has ‘sold’ her that privilege for trinkets, he reclaims her for her loyalty and has the second quartered between wild stallions.

37 ‘Il figliuolo del re’ and ‘Federika,’ in Domenico Comparetti, Novelline popolari italiane (Rome: Loescher, 1875), vol. I, nos. 9 and 36, pp. 38–9, 146–50.

38 Cuentos populares españoles (Madrid: S. Aguirre, 1947), vol. II, p. 487.

39 Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), p. 5.

40 In Fabliaux ou contes du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, ed. P.J.B. (Paris: Le Grand d’Aussy, 1781), vol. IV, pp. 173–8; (reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), pp. 385–6.

41 William Caxton, trans., The Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. M.Y. Offord (London: Early English Text Society and Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 41–3.

42 Trans. W.G. Waters, 3 vols. (London: Privately Printed for Members of the Society of Bibliophiles, 1898), vol. I, pp. 52–73.

43 Trans. Edward Hutton (London, 1620; reprint, New York: The Heritage Press, 1940), pp. 389–406. This story is also ‘Mistresse Helena of Florence,’ in Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, ed. Joseph Jacobs (New York: Dover, 1966), pt. II, no. 31, vol. III, pp. 329–53.

44 A complete citation of all the relevant passages of both authors may be found in Straparola, Le piacevoli notti, ed. Donato Pirovano (Rome: Salerno, 2000), pp. xxxix–xli.

45 [Antoine de la Salle], Les cent nouvelles nouvelles, ed. Roger Dubuis (Lyons: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1991), pp. 31–5.

46 This is a significant fact, for Painter’s very influential collection of tales and novelle by Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, and others contains but this one story by Straparola – proof that he was known. It constitutes one of the few Straparola tales appearing in a close translation into English before the end of the nineteenth century – there are six or seven others mentioned in the commentaries to follow. The Palace of Pleasure was published in parts, the first in 1566, the second in 1567, in London by Henry Denham and Henry Binneman, respectively. It was edited by Joseph Jacobs for publication by David Nutt in London, 1890, and later reprinted (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), vol. II, 18–28.

47 See Giorgio Melchiori, ‘Introduction,’ The Merry Wives of Windsor (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 2000), pp. 13–15, and Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 5 vols. (London: Routledge & Paul, 1957–75), vol. II, pp. 3–58.

48 Straparola also developed this story in the present collection as the first story of the fourth night.

49 Les contes du monde aventureux, où sont récitées plusieurs belles histoires mémorables, par A.D.S.D. (Paris: Estienne Groulleau, 1555); the initials indicate, perhaps, one of the three following: Antoine de Saint-Denis; Abraham de Saint-Dié; or André de Saint-Didier.

50 L’Arcadia di Brenta (1667), ed. Quinto Marini (Rome: Salerno, 2004); according to the editor, Sagredo’s source is Bandello, Novelle, pt. I, no. 3, outlined below, but the differences are striking. Sagredo tells a lively tale of a student who pursues a married woman, only to find himself tricked and stuffed into a trunk in anticipation of her husband’s return. He is further terrified when she invites her husband to change shirts, which he does by poking about in the trunk for another. The trial and teaching by fear was complete. Nevertheless, intent upon a turnabout, this student manages to entice the lady to visit him in a garden pavilion outside the city. There her husband arrives as well, but this time she is caught in bed with nowhere to go and takes herself for dead. The student covers her up and goes out to meet the husband to whom he offers to reveal the subject of his delight up to her breasts. All present ask to see the lady’s face, but the séance comes to an end and the door is locked shut behind him. All concerned are then left to ponder their respective encounters with fear.

51 Pierre de Bourdeille Brantôme, Vies des dames galantes (Paris: Gallimard, [1666], 1981), pp. 80–2. Also, Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies (New York: Liveright, 1933). The list might also have included no. 21 in Nicolas de Troyes’ Le grand parangon which, according to Krystyna Kasprzyk, dates to the 1530s. Le grand parangon (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1970), p. ix. But this work seems to have remained in manuscript form for some time and may never have gained real currency before the edition by Émile Mabille, first published in 1866. Les amants heureux (Amsterdam: Le petit David, 1695).

52 Matteo Bandello, Le novelle, ed. Giochio Brognoligo, 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1928–31), pt. I, no. 3, vol. I, pp. 44–55. These stories may be found in other Italian editions, such as in Tutte le opere, ed. Francesco Flora (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1952); the five-volume edition, ed. Bruno Cagli (Bologna: Sampietro, 1967); as well as in the English translation by John Payne, The Novels of Matteo Bandello (London: Villon Society, 1890).

53 Ernest Hatch Wilkins, A History of Italian Literature, rev. ed. Thomas Bergin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 233.

54 Wendunmuth, ed. Hermann Oesterley, 5 vols. (Tübingen: Litterarischen Verein in Stuttgart, 1869; reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1980), bk. I, sect. 2, 65, vol. II, pp. 528–9. This tale makes its first appearance in the English-speaking world in ‘A Tael of a Freer and a Shoemakers Wyef’ in Thomas Churchyard’s The First Parte of Churchyardes Chippes (London: Thomas Marshe, 1575), pp. 84–92. In this parallel rendition, a worldly friar seduces the cobbler’s wife after taking her to his cell for the night. Early the next day he leaves her, eager to avoid punishment for missing the morning prayers. Then he sees the cobbler and invites him to his cell to measure his own wife’s feet for shoes, placing the woman in a terrible fright. Several weeks later, to pay him back for so dastardly a trick, she invites the friar to her own house, gets him ready for bed, sends her houseboy to the shop to fetch her husband, feigns alarm over his arrival, and bundles the churchman into a trunk. Then she makes as if she were overcome by a terrible pinch in her vitals and calls for aqua vita, which is kept in the trunk, whereupon her trusty husband beats at the sturdy lock with a hatchet until it is about to break. Only then does she tell him to desist because her stitch had now passed. To be sure, once her husband is out of the house, she triumphantly announces her revenge.

55 Ed. Bollandi, ‘De sanctis sororibus Agape, Chionia et Irene,’ vol. I, pp. 245–50. Hippolyte Delehaye describes the main events from the Légendier romain, stating that Anastasia accompanied the three sisters to prison after their arraignment by Diocletian in Aquileia. Dulcitius, the prison keeper, was to torment them for refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods. Upon entering their cell, however, he was taken by a madness which led him to a kitchen where he began embracing the pots and pans, leaving him all covered in soot. In this way, the three sisters were temporarily spared. Étude sur le légendier romain: Les saints de novembre et de décembre (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1936), p. 152.

56 Donald Attwater, The Avenel Dictionary of Saints (1965; reprint, New York: Avenel, 1981), p. 34.

57 The play is known by the name of the Macedonian governor, but its given title is Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins, Agape, Chionia and Hirena. The Plays of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, trans. Katharina Wilson (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), pp. 37–49.

58 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol. I, pp. 43–4. No doubt created as a manual for preachers, it survives in over 1,000 manuscripts and was translated into all the languages of Western Europe. Caxton produced his English version in 1483.

59 His Farewell to Military Profession, ed. Donald Beecher (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, and Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1992), pp. 202–17.

60 See Donato Pirovano, Le piacevoli notti (Rome: Salerno, 2000), p. xxxvii; for the corresponding passage in Boccaccio, see The Decameron, trans. J.M. Rigg (London: Navarre Society, ca. 1900), vol. II, p. 300.

61 A letter by Anton Francesco Doni to Francesco Ravesla, 10 March 1547, speaks of the novella (Belphagor) and other prose Brevio was about to publish that was copied from Machiavelli and that was rightfully the latter’s. In the annotations to ‘Belphagor’ (III.3), in Gabriel Chappuys, Facétieuses journées, ed. Michel Bideaux (Paris: Champion, 2003), p. 841. When Machiavelli’s novella was published two years later, accompanying letters from his son expressed the desire to re-establish Machiavelli’s claim to his work. Doni then published his own version in 1551, a year after the first volume of the Piacevoli notti appeared. In light of this little controversy, one must choose between another plagiarism on Straparola’s part with his many changes introduced to disguise his debts, or a creation indebted only to a popular tradition from which Machiavelli himself drew his materials.

62 William Axon, ‘The Story of Belfagor in Literature and Folk-Lore,’ Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature 23, no. 2 (London: Asher & Co., 1902), p. 118. Omitted from the approach to sources is the brief ‘fabula’ on the topic outlining the telltale action of the Devil taking a wife, but without dialogue, names, or episodes in Lorenzo Abstemio’s Hecatomythium (Venice, 1499), no. 194. Yet it may have been a vehicle of inspiration. The work was frequently published together with Aesop throughout the sixteenth century.

63 Giovanni Brevio published his ‘Belfagore’ in Rime et prose volgari (Rome: Antonio Blado, Asulano, 1545) an unspecified period of time after it was written. It may be found in English in The Italian Novelists, ed. Thomas Roscoe (London: F. Warne [1824], 1880). Niccolò Machiavelli’s Novella di Belfagor was published posthumously in 1549, but was very likely written as early as 1518. Anton Francesco Doni’s recension, with ambiguous acknowledgment to both writers, could not have predated the Secretary’s, for in 1518 he was but five years of age, although he was born in Florence and did not leave until 1538. His collection entitled Novelle was edited by G. Petraglione (Bergamo: Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1907). See also Giuseppe Calligaris, Anton Francesco Doni e la novella di Belfagor (Turin: Unione tip.-editrice, 1889).

64 Gabriel Chappuys, Les facétieuses journées, ed. Michel Bideaux (Paris: Champion, 2003), p. 843. Chappuys published his collection in 1584, with a version of the story based on Brevio, taken from the 1566 edition of Sansovino’s Cento novelle scelte in which Straparola’s story (since 1562) had been replaced. Straparola’s was no. 64 in the 1561 edition.

65 Marziano Guglielminetti sides with the mainstream of opinion concerning Straparola as a plagiarist when regarding his handling of some twenty-three tales from Morlini’s novelle, but is among the few to recognize the folkloric origins of the present story for all of these writers. La cornice e il furto: studi sulla novella del ‘500 (Bologna: N. Zanichelli, 1984), pp. 63–9.

66 Indian Nights Entertainment (London: E. Stock, 1892), pp. 298ff.

67 The Enchanted Parrot, trans. B. Hale Wortham (London: Luzac, 1911), nos. 56 and 57, pp. 92–4. This story is the source of the adjusted version in the Persian Tooti nameh described below. One might well ask if Machiavelli knew the Suka saptati given that Story 61 (pp. 113–15) features the whole of the plot of the Mandragola. A glowering and disagreeable merchant and his good-looking and light-hearted wife Tejuka live in a village. She wants a lover and finds one in a religious procession. She makes signs and tells him to throw a pot into the house containing a serpent. When it gets out, she’ll claim to be bitten. He, meanwhile, will be loitering in the streets disguised as a doctor. The husband finds him, of course, is told the diagnosis is grave, and is given an ointment for it that is toxic. The husband is told to administer it himself, but it makes his eyes burn, so the doctor has to take over. The lovers then enjoy their bliss, while the merchant is pleased by the cure and opens his house to the doctor for a good many visits thereafter. Is this close enough?

68 Archibald Henry Sayce, ‘Cairene Folklore,’ Folk-Lore 9, no. 4 (1900), pp. 354–95; see p. 374. A similar version was collected for the same number of this review beginning on p. 213. It is related to a version traced to the Tales of a Parrot (Tooti Nameh), telling of a demon driven out of his pipal tree by a scolding wife, sending the demon and the Brahmin, her husband, on the road to repeat the exorcism game until the demon refuses to emerge before being threatened with the wife’s return. Further to the surviving Eastern versions, see William Axton, ‘The Story of Belfagor in Literature and Folk-Lore,’ Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature 23, no. 2 (London: Asher & Co., 1902), p. 114.

69 Sheykh Zada ‘The Twenty-seventh Vezir’s Story,’ in History of the Forty Vezirs or the Story of the Forty Morns and Eves, ed. E.J.W. Gibb (London: George Redway, 1886), pp. 288–94. This is the nineteenth-century translation of the Turkish Qirq Vezir Tarikhi, a translation from the Arabic dating to the earliest years of the fifteenth century. Of the Arabian original little is known, but it seems to have shared features with the Sindibad group. See W.A. Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions, ed. Christine Goldberg (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2002), p. 280.

70 Michel Bideaux (pp. 844–5) has an intriguing explanation of how Machiavelli came, through his investigations into Florentine history, to employ the name ‘Belfagor,’ which he derives from Roderigo-Belfagor, a name arising in Spain in association with Americo Vespucci’s sojourn there in 1491. Luigi Pulci, however, employed the name in his Morgante, trans. Joseph Tusiani (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), bk. IV, strophe 97, and there the matter may rest, for scholars otherwise are inclined to attribute the name to the Moabite idol Ba’al-Peor.

71 Jacques de Vitry, Sermones feriales et communes, sermon 17, sect. 7, in Goswin Frenken, Die Exempla des Jacob von Vitry (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1914), no. 60, pp. 127–8; it is also in Carolyn Müssig, The Faces of Women in the Sermons of Jacques de Vitry (Toronto: Peregrina, 1999), pp. 154–5.

72 This work came too late to my attention to investigate. Versions of the Eastern tale are reportedly to have been written by Lafebvre de Thérouane in 1488, and by Abstemius in 1495, according to S. Prato in ‘Quelques contes littéraire dans la tradition populaire,’ RTP 4 (1889), p. 174. But the certainty of their existence and their potential relationship to Straparola remain to be determined. The Hecatomythion appears to have been joined to the Fabulæ ex græco in latinum per Laurentium Abstemium (Venice: Ioannem de Cereto de Tridino, 1495).

73 Ausgewahlte poetische Werke, ed. and rev. Karl Pannier (Leipzig: n.p., n.d), pp. 163ff.

74 The Straparolan motif of the wife driven to nagging by her longing to keep up with the latest fashions has an important prototype in the tale of the ‘Burgess of France’ in The Novellino, a collection originating in the late thirteenth century known as Lo cento novelle antiche; a wide-ranging assembly of tales and vignettes predating all the other collections of novelle. Whether it is a source or a cognate version stemming from the same generic folk tradition that gave rise to Straparola’s tale remains moot, but clearly both enjoy a common inheritance, for in the early tale a citizen’s wife, vexed by her inability to rival the other women in the village in matters of dress, drives her husband to usury, earning for herself the reprimand of no less a figure than the wise prophet Merlin, who inspired her to remove her ‘wicked robe.’ The Novellino, intro. Janet L. Smarr, trans. Roberta Payne (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), no. 25, pp. 48–9.

75 Francesco Sansovino, Cento novella scelte (Venice: [Francesco Sansovino], 1561), no. 64, pp. 267v–272r.

76 L’utile col dolce (Naples: Giacinto Passaro, 1578); L’utile col dolce (Venice, 1733), cent. I, pp. 85–6.

77 Giambattista Fagiuoli, Il matrimonio del diavolo. The author died in 1742 and the first two printings are rare. It was reprinted in Venice in 1820. For more on this reference, see Giambattista Passano, Il novellieri italiano in verso (Bologna: G. Romagnoli, 1868), pp. 174–5.

78 Facétieuses journées (Paris: J. Heuzé, 1584); Gabriel Chappuys, Facétieuses journées, ed. Michel Bideaux (Paris: Champion, 2003), pp. 370–9.

79 In Vie des poètes grecs (Paris: C. de Sercy, 1665).

80 This work claims to be a historical novel translated from the Italian by Charlotte Catherine Patin (later attributed to Machiavelli, despite its 119 pages) (Paris: A. Baratropolis, 1745).

81 Poème du quinquina et autres ouvrages en vers [Belphégor] (Paris: chez D. Thierry, 1682); Oeuvres, ed. Louis Moland, 7 vols. (Paris: Garnier frères, 1872–86), vol. IV, pp. 443ff.

82 His Farewell to Military Profession, ed. Donald Beecher (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, and Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1992), pp. 315–22.

83 The full title is Grim the Collier of Croydon; Or, The Devil and His Dame: With The Devil and Saint Dunston, first printed as Gratiae Theatrales, or, A Choice Ternary of English Plays (London: R. D[odsley], 1662; reprint, Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1984; ed. William M. Baillie).

84 The Dramatic Works of John Wilson, ed. James Maidment and W.H. Logan (Edinburgh, 1874), pp. 287ff.

85 ‘The Story of Belfagor in Literature and Folk-lore,’ Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature 23, no. 2 (London: Asher & Co., 1902), pp. 110–11. This work contains a ‘first’ translation of Brevio’s Belfagore, discounting that which was made by Thomas Roscoe in The Italian Novelists, 1825. Robert Browning, in the nineteenth century, developed the basic materials in his own way in ‘Doctor———,’ one of his ‘dramatic idyls’ told by a rabbi, in which Satan is sent to earth as the representative of Death, but who nevertheless agrees that ‘A Bad Wife’ is an even greater power. When the Devil’s offspring comes of age, the father declares that he will become a doctor, and that the two of them will work together to kill off the patients, with the explanation that their arrival came too late. When the Emperor falls sick and the doctor (of death) is called in, the Emperor promises him his ‘only daughter, fair beyond belief! Save me – to-morrow shall the knot be tied!’ The son desires such a marriage and asks his father to desist long enough for him to win the prize. But Satan replies, ‘Fool, I must have my prey!’ So the boy asks to have his mother sent for and with that, the Devil goes through the roof cursing, leaving only a whiff of sulphur behind. Death is again defeated by a bad wife and so the son is married. The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning, ed. Saxe Commins (New York: The Modern Library, 1934), pp. 1086–9.

86 Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 586–8, from G. Pitrè, Fiabe, novelle e racconti popolari siciliani, no. 54; ‘Lu diavulu Zuppiddu,’ 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), vol. II, p. 854. A similar story was collected by Domenico Giuseppe Bernoni, ‘El diavolo,’ in Fiabe popolari veneziane (Venice: Fontana-Ottolini, 1873). An amusing version of this tale appears as ‘The Devil Who Took to Himself a Wife,’ in Roman Legends: A Collection of the Fables and Folktales of Rome, trans. Rachel Harriette Busk (Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1877), pp. 343–5. This devil wins a contest in hell and his prize is liberation, whereupon he heads for earth to marry. True to form, he finds a pretty, argumentative spendthrift who drives him out of house and home. But he offers her one last good turn to set her up before leaving, which was to allow her to play doctor to a possessed queen, the first time with his collaboration. After a three-day charade of ointments and hocus pocus, the devil departs. But the wife takes to the game and follows the reports of the newly possessed. ‘What! you here again!’ says the devil, and each time tells her to scram, but she is under a death threat and thus can do no other than nag and screech until he acquiesces, perpetuating the domestic spat by instalments until the devil escapes back to hell. That she was under a death threat to perform is again redolent of Straparola, and of the many stock folktale employments of this device, as in ‘Livoretto,’ III.2 and ‘Costanza,’ IV.1.

87 Pierre Jean-Baptiste Le Grand d’Aussy, Fabliaux et contes du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Eugene Onfroy, 1781), vol. III, pp. 226–40; (reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), pp. 398–401. It is also found in Etienne Barbazon, ‘Constant Duhamel,’ in Fabliaux et contes des poetes francois des XIe, XIIe, XIIIe, XIVe, et XIe siecles (Paris, 1808), vol. III, p. 296; (reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1976).

88 This fabliau shares a design in common with ‘The Three Hunchbacks’ upon which Straparola’s story of that title (V.3) is closely affiliated. The hunchback visitors are not lovers, they all perish while in hiding, and the rest of the story is concerned with getting the bodies out of the house without the wife’s husband finding out. Nevertheless, there are close affinities with the Estormi type, as well as a tale in the Mishle Sendebar, in which the wives work in conjunction with their husbands, as here, to dupe the lovers out of their money before killing them, for which see the Commentary to V.3. Another early version is included among the Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues, tirés du receuil inédit d’Etienne de Bourbon, Dominicain du XIIIe siècle, ed. Albert Lecoy de la Marche (Paris: Renouard, 1887), no. 469, p. 404.

89 Opus theatricum [including thirty-six] Fassnacht oder Possen Spiel [by Ayrer] (Nuremberg: B. Scherssen, 1618), pp. 84b–89g.

90 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Edward Hutton (New York: Heritage Press, [1620], 1940), pp. 406–10.

91 Novelle Porrettane, ed. Giancarlo Barnabei (Bologna: Santarini, 1992), pp. 169–73. Giovanni Forteguerri tells the story of Guerra Filippini who sought to seduce Lisa Rustichi, but found himself robbed by her husband instead and compelled to give over his mission. Novelle (Bologna: G. Romagnoli, 1882), pp. 177ff.

92 Cento novella scelte (Venice: Francesco Rampazetto, 1561), vol. IX, p. 8.

93 Also apt for comparison is Matteo Bandello’s forty-third novella, featuring two gallants rather than three, who end up in a barrel which is then carried into public and opened, exposing the cavaliers to view. Tutte le opere, ed. Francesco Flora (Verona: Mondadori, 1952), vol. III, pp. 142ff.

94 ed. Michel Bideaux (Paris: Champion, 2003), pp. 764–70. The original work of Les facétieuses journées was first published in Paris by J. Houzé in 1584.

95 Guillaume Bouchet, Sieur de Brocourt, Les Serées (Poitiers: Guillaume Bouchet, 1585), no. 32, p. 592; Les Serées du librairie-imprimeur G. Bouchet, ed. Jean-Claude Arnould (Paris: Champion, 2006).

96 (Lyons: C. La Rivière, 1650), p. 326.

97 (Lyons: J. Huguetan, 1650). The relationship between these two final citations requests further investigation.

98 Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Garnier, 1872–6), vol. IV, pp. 27–36.

99 Contos tradicionais do povo português (1883; reprint, Lisbon: Publicaçôes Dom Quixote, 1987), no. 116, vol. I, pp. 265–6.