1 The American poet Robert Bly was particularly attracted to this tale and its long tradition in relation to his own concerns with the confusion of the modern American male due to the breakdown of the mentoring relationships that were once in place whereby young men found positive role models in their male elders. Bly’s book entitled Iron John, from the Grimms’ version of the ‘Guerrino’ type recounted below, briefly reviews the collective narrative tradition as a myth of mentoring by which the wild man becomes the source of the young hero’s dynamic energy, direction, and renewed courage in times of despair. This, he would argue, is the particular dimension that made the story useful to its auditors throughout the history of its dissemination. Bly reads and interprets this story in relation to his group clinics intended to help restore the dignity and emotional life of the American male. Iron John (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990).

2 Die Märchen des Straparola, in Sammlung alter Märchen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1817), vol. I, p. 302.

3 From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile’s ‘Lo cunto de li cunti’ and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), p. 178.

4 The entire medieval-Renaissance debate concerning the wild man pertained to his nature, whether he was ‘bare unaccommodated man’ following self-reduction through melancholy (related to lycanthropy), a hybrid offspring of human and animal parents, hence a form of monstrosity, or an intermediary species between man and animal. Because he fell outside discussions of the soul and related theological matters, he became a perfect laboratory for examining heterodox social and psychological states. The question was whether he was a beast trained up to human capacities through obedience and language acquisition, or a man reduced to animal depravity by melancholy and madness and thus in need of enforced treatment, therapy, and regimen. This lapse into savagery, as Richard Bernheimer points out, was often reflected in the names of knights, such as ‘Sir Dodinel le Sauvage.’ Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 8. This study contains important chapters on the complex mythology associated with the wild man and related topics, pp. 21–48.

5 According to John of Trevisa, fauns and satyrs are declared bestial because of their uncontrollable lust for women. Thus, the satyr in the story of ‘Costanza’ is not essentially such a creature, for he knew that she was a young woman all along, but made no effort to assault her. On the Properties of Things, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975–88), vol. II, pp. 1199–1200.

6 ‘The Forms of Wildness: Archeology of an Idea,’ in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximilian Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p. 22.

7 Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), p. 62. This discussion arises from Ferrand’s inclusion of lycanthropy in his study of the madness of unrequited lovers. In his words, ‘Avicenna teaches that if this disease becomes habitual it is incurable and renders the victim hectical, sottish, dull, and sometimes so savage that he turns lycanthropic or takes his own life, as I demonstrated earlier with several examples,’ p. 307. An account of this phenomenon also appears in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. A.R. Shilletto (London: Bell, 1912), pt. I, sect. 1, memb. 1, subsect. 4, vol. I, pp. 160–4.

8 Malcolm Jones, ‘Wild Man,’ in Medieval Folklore, ed. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, and John Lindow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 433. Jones elaborates on this portrait and provides many iconographical sources. In the Medieval Latin Historia Alexandri Magni de Preliis, Alexander is met by a huge hairy man with a voice like a boar’s and an outsized phallus. Alexander orders a naked maiden to be put in front of him to see his reaction. When he attacks her with an excess of male aggression it is determined that he is not a man out of control but a true beast and thus subject to slaughter, although in related tales it is the female who becomes responsible for rendering the male civilized, as in Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in which the old lady takes a rapist for her husband after giving him a lesson on ‘gentillesse.’ These themes are central to the wild man in literature, but do not pertain to the story under investigation here. See The Prose Life of Alexander, ed. J.S. Westlake, for the Early English Text Society (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1913), pp. 89–90. Further to the erotomania of the wild man, see Richard Bernheimer, pp. 121ff.

9 ‘Valentine and Orson,’ A Study in Late Medieval Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), p. 116.

10 The final episode is illogical simply because the king offers one of his two daughters to the hero, then says that if, by blind chance, he chooses the silverhaired Eleuteria he would lose his life. To be sure, it is in keeping with the ancient tradition of high risk bride selection games of the type featured in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Nevertheless, Eleuteria was a perfectly acceptable bride for Rubinetto and was hence not a poison maiden. An animal helper was a conventional means for resolving the dilemma. What we might otherwise have expected is a plot in which the hero had to identify his beloved disguised and placed among unacceptable choices.

11 Stith Thompson, The Folktale (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1946], 1977), pp. 60–1.

12 Another feature almost universal to the story type abandoned by Straparola is the ‘obstacle flight’ in which the horse advises the boy to drop his talismanic objects behind him at critical moments in his flight to stop his pursuers. These include a comb that turns to a forest, and other magic objects that turn to lakes and other natural barriers.

13 The reader is directed to the ‘Introduction’ in the critical edition of the English text of Valentine and Orson, ed. Arthur Dickson, trans. Henry Watson (London: Oxford, 1937; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprints, 1971). One of the most thorough investigations of the sources of this work is to be found in Arthur Dickson’s Valentine and Orson: A Study in Late Medieval Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929). Versions in languages other than French predate the earliest surviving French version, but internal evidence, such as the setting in the Charlemagne Cycle, nevertheless indicates French origins in the early fourteenth century. Because the Middle Low German version Von Nameloss unde Valentyn (MS. 102 c of the Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek, Hamburg) is altogether closer in ethos and design to the folk tale upon which the entire tradition is based, it is to be presumed that the French original resembled it rather more than it did the later Valentin et Orson from which all the English versions are derived. It reveals how the work emerged from the ‘envious sisters’ type that informed ‘The Truth-speaking Bird’ (IV.3), otherwise referred to as ‘the traduced or banished queen’ type. The basic story, it is to be recalled, involves a queen who, at the time of the birth of her children, is betrayed by her sisters, or a wicked stepmother, after which her children are exposed, she is blamed for their disappearance, and she too is banished or locked up. The onus is placed upon the children to recover their birthright and rescue their mother. Imagine now that the children are two boys, that after their exposure they are separated, that one is raised in the wilds by a wolf or bear while the other is raised at a neighbouring court, and that the civilized brother must capture, train, befriend, and gain the loyalty of the savage brother before they can embark on the adventures that lead to the liberation or rediscovery of their beleaguered mother. In that version, the wild man is superimposed upon the brother raised in the forest (Orson from ours, bear). ‘Guerrino’ issues from a different folk tale, that of the child who liberates, is succoured by, disobeys, yet has recourse to the special powers of a wild man. The two stories stood side by side in the late medieval imagination.

14 French Medieval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France, trans. Eugene Mason (New York: E.P. Dutton [1911], 1924), pp. 83–90. Sir Orfeo, during the quest for his wife Heurodis, also takes on the properties of the wild man, growing long black hair, again linking the sufferings of love to the reversion to nature and depravation as well as to the pathology of melancholy. Middle English Romances, ed. A.C. Gibbs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), ll. 247–52; ‘Sir Orfeo,’ in Middle English Verse Romances, ed. Donald Sands (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), ll. 240–3, p. 192.

15 Valentin et Orson survives in a prose version published in Lyons by Jacques Maillet in 1489. There followed the translation by Henry Watson published by Wynkyn de Worde, ca. 1510, and again as The Historye of the two Valyaunte Brethren: Valentyne and Orson, published by William Copland in 1548, 1555, 1565; ed. Arthur Dickson for the Early English Text Society (Oxford: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1937). Richard Hathwaye and Anthony Munday also reworked the material for publication in 1598. The tale has many sequels including that which appears in Tabart’s Collection of Popular Stories, 3 vols. (London: Tabart & Co., 1809), vol. III, pp. 127–63. It comes under close scrutiny by Dorothy Yamamoto in The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), passim.

16 Il Guerrin meschino, ed. Mauro Cursietti (Rome: Antenore, 2005).

17 Wentworth Webster, Légendes basques, trans. Nicolas Burguete ([Anglet]: Aubéron, 2005), pp. 55–67; published originally in English as Basque Legends (London: Griffith & Farran, 1877), p. 176.

18 Robert le Diable, ed. Élisabeth Gaucher (Paris: Champion, 2006). This may have been predated by the German version, but served as the source for the early translations into English as Anon., The lyfe of Roberte the Devyll (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1992). See Élisabeth Gauchet, Robert le Diable: Histoire d’une légende (Paris: Champion, 2003). Anon, La terrible et merveilleuse vie de Robert le diable ([Paris]: Claude Blihart, n.d.).

19 Hausmärchen (Göttingen: Dietrisch’sche Buchhandlung, 1851), pp. 269–85. In this same group is ‘Der eiserne Mann, Der Lohn des Gehorsams’ (The iron man or the reward of obedience) by Christian August Vulpius in his Ammenmärchen (Weimar: 1791), pp. 173–240. This work is an extensive meditation on love, duty, obedience, and the doublings in relationships that pleased the Romantic imagination. At the same time, the work is a complete representation of the betrayal of the goodhearted iron man living far away in the forest who, in helping the king, loses his territory, is captured, and presented to the queen as an amusement in despite of his good will. The young prince Salker is his liberator and for that deed narrowly escapes death. The soldiers slay a wild pig in his place and return the heart while leaving the boy at the edge of the forest. There he meets with the iron man, but with two critical pages missing (186–7) the terms of his earliest apprenticeship with him are missing. What follows is the story of obedience step by step in winning the princess by tempting her with beautiful balls, while fighting incognito in the king’s wars. With each ball the prince asks to sleep nearer and nearer the princess, until, with the third, he gains access to her bed. But the king takes his daughter’s place and in examining the mysterious boy he finds the battle wound that identifies the unidentified warrior. There is no rival, no golden hair, no departures on a crippled horse, no episodes in the garden, but the story is in direct line with the later tales of Wolf and von Arnim. More than either, however, it is a meditation on fate and domestic happiness, reconciliation and gratitude, with the final twenty pages devoted to a quest in fairyland through enchanted castles that goes far beyond the outlines of the traditional tale. It is a full scale work of the Romantic imagination.

20 ‘Der Eise Hans,’ in Hundert neue Märchen in Gebirge gesammelt (Charlottenburg: E. Bauer, 1844), in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, ed. Jack Zipes (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 326–9. The story also occurs in the most southerly German-speaking regions as ‘Goldener’ in Ignaz and Josef Zingherle, Tirols Volksdichtungen und Volksgebräuche, 2 vols. (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner’schen Buchhandlung, 1852–4), vol. I, pp. 192–9.

21 ‘Iron Hans,’ in Kinder- und Hausmärchen Gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1812), in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, ed. Jack Zipes, pp. 323–5; Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales (Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday, n.d.), pp. 435–40. Zipes also includes ‘The Wild Man’ (De wilde Man), from the same work, 1815, no. 50 in the original collection, although it was omitted from the edition of 1843 because of its close resemblance to ‘Iron Hans.’ The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, pp. 323–5.

22 Contes français, vol. 8 of Collection de contes et de chansons populaires, ed. Henry Carnoy (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1885), vol. VII, pp. 43–50. There are also features pertaining to wild men and to episodes from the Goldener Märchen tradition in the Cabinets des fées (Geneva: Barde and Manget, 1785–9), vol. V, 80–101, and in Count Hamilton’s ‘Les quatre facardins,’ vol. XX, pp. 472ff.

23 F.M. Luzel, ‘Le Murlu ou l’homme sauvage,’ Contes populaires de Basse-Bretagne (Paris: Maisonneuve & Leclerc, 1887), vol. II, pp. 296–313.

24 Novelline popolari italiane (Bologna: Forni editore, 1875), no. 5, pp. 18–22.

25 The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, ed. and trans. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 2009), vol. I, pp. 411–16.

26 Il Pentamerone, trans. Richard Burton (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), pp. 247–52.

27 Joseph Haltrich, Deutsche Volksmärchen aus dem Sachsenlande in Siebenbürgen (Munich: Jubiläumsausgabe, [1856], 1956), pp. 28–30.

28 ‘The Swineherd,’ in Apples of Immortality, Folktales of Armenia, ed. Leon Surmelian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), no. 2, pp. 53–64. The story of the wild man liberated by a young boy was also combined with other familiar fairy tale motifs as in ‘The Princess on the Glass Mountain.’ That story was collected by Benjamin Thorpe and published in his Yule-Tide Stories: A Collection of Scandinavian and North German Popular Tales and Traditions (London: Henry Bohn, 1853), pp. 86–97. The opening is so like Straparola’s tale that it requires no summarization. The boy in exile, before meeting up with the liberated wild man, seeks employment at a foreign court where an eligible princess demands of the one who is to win her that he ride to the top of a glass mountain. The prince has taken up cattle herding for the king and rediscovers his wild man, who then supplies him with a steed and several splendid suits of armour that serve as disguises. When the princess identifies the mysterious knight as the herd-boy in the crowd, a fairy tale ending ensues and the wild man simply disappears.

29 Les illustres fées, contes galans (Paris: M-M. Brunet, 1698); in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, ed. Jack Zipes (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 316–25.

30 The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, ed. Jack Zipes, p. 316.

31 The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, ed. Jack Zipes, p. 318.

32 Giovan Francesco Straparola, Les nuits facétieuses, trans. Joël Gayraud ([Paris]: José Corti, 1999), p. 624. ‘On y trouve la fixation à l’enfance, avec la poupée, qui joue ici le rôle du symptôme, et la pulsion sadique avec menace de castration, dans l’épisode où la poupée mord les fesses du roi et lui pincer cruellement les testicules.’ In his analysis, the doll’s biting and squeezing is symptomatic of the king’s childhood fixations, sadistic impulses or fears, and a castration complex (all of which Adamantina resolves, perhaps, through marriage?).

33 Five Books of the Lives, Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel, intro. Anatole de Montaiglon, trans. Thomas Urquhart and Peter Antony Motteux, 2 vols. (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1892), vol. I, pp. 43–7. The finest of these was ‘the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs,’ etc.

34 Metrical Translations from Sanskrit Writers, trans. John Muir (London: Trübner, 1879; reprint, London: Routledge, 2000), p. 27. See also The Mahabarata, trans. R.K. Narayan (London: Mandarin, 1991).

35 Panchatantra, trans. Chandra Rajan (London: Penguin, 1993), bk. III, no. 6, pp. 305–6; ‘Le Brahmane et le serpent,’ in the Panchatantra, trans. Édouard Lancereau (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), pp. 241–2.

36 Fables, ed. Harriet Spiegel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), no. 52, pp. 155–6.

37 Gesta romanorum, trans. Charles Swan and Wynnard Hooper (New York: Dover [1876], 1959), pp. 246–7.

38 The Fables of Avianus, trans. David R. Slavitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 43–4. The gold-excreting donkey and all his many literary relatives need only be mentioned briefly here because they were merely natural donkeys made to appear magical by their dishonest owners. The donkey of the Historia di Campriano contadino will serve in illustration of the generic trick of shoving coins into the anus so that the donkey may appear to be excreting them to the eyes of naïve beholders willing to pay a very high price for such an animal. Typically, this donkey fails to perform after purchase, in a way roughly parallel to Adamantina’s doll in the hands of the neighbours, which brings the purchasers back to the shrewd peasant, who always puts them off with a clever reply: that it is all their fault in not following instructions or not treating the animal properly as he professes to have explained. This story is closely related to the tricks in the ‘Scarpacifico’ group (I.3). The story is suitably old, at one time attributed to Giovanni Pietro Polendrini (or Palantrini). It was first published in 1518 as well as in 1550 and 1579. The coin trick is preserved in Italo Calvino’s ‘The Story of Campriano,’ in Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (New York: Pantheon, 1980), no. 82, pp. 298–301; it is a late folk version of an established and widely circulating medieval tale. See Jan M. Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 157–60. W.A. Clouston, in Popular Tales and Fictions, ed. Christine Goldberg (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2002), pp. 31–6, has a small chapter on ‘Gold-Producing Animals,’ in which he mentions further examples linked to the Eastern tale of the benefactor animal slain to capture all its wealth, as in ‘Le lion aux sequins d’or,’ in Contes albanais, trans. Louis Auguste Henri Dozon (Paris: Leroux, 1881), pp. 139–46, that features a poor man with a wife and son, and a lion that drops coins from its lips. Somehow the boy’s family fortunes, and the fact that he is jeered by the neighbourhood boys for being a booby, causes him to take it out on the lion which he assumes to be the cause of it all. The mother foolishly gives him the key to the cage, where, for nicking the lion’s tail with his saber, he is torn to pieces. The lion continues to give gold to the penitent father, but renounces all future friendship with humankind.

39 Novelle e favole, ed. Giovanni Villani (Rome: Salerno, [1983]), no. 41, pp. 198–201; Les nouvelles de Girolamo Morlini (Paris: E. Sansot, 1904), pp. 102–3. Andrea Calmo (1509–1570) testifies to the wide circulation of ‘tante fanfalughe’ (such folderol) in his day, mentioning the story of the ‘Aseno che andete remito.’ Le lettere, ed. Vittorio Rossi (Turin: E. Loescher, 1888), p. 346.

40 Giovanni Battista Basile, ‘The Goose,’ in Il Pentamerone, trans. Sir Richard Burton (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), pp. 393–6.

41 ‘The Biting Doll’ (La pupidda), 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. 288, vol. II, pp. 785–9. A further example is ‘Il Ciuchino caca-zecchini’ (The coin-shitting doll), in Gherardo Nerucci, Le sessanta novelle popolari montalesi, ed. Roberto Fedi and Eugenio Montale (Milan: Rizzoli, 1997), no. 43, pp. 359–63. This story shares in common merely the coin-excreting animal given to the son of a poor widow by his uncle with advice not to share his secret. From that point onward, it is the story of the boy who loses each gift given to him by his benefactor to a shrewd inn-keeper, including the banquet-furnishing tablecloth, until he arrives with the beating stick, which so clobbers the host that he is brought to return all three gifts to the boy. The story is taken over in truncated form by Ludwig Bechstein in his Neues deutsches Märchenbuch, in which the second part is discarded dealing with a king, his malady, and the sudden rise of the doll’s owner from pauper to queen. It tells of the little girl whose special doll makes golden eggs only for her and smelly eggs for everyone else. ‘Dukaten-Angele,’ in Neues deutsches Märchenbuch (Leipzig: Hartleben, 1856), no. 50, and also in Bechstein’s Sämtliche Märchen (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1971), pp. 692–9.

42 On the suspense and excitement generated by the iterative forms and the ironic readings of reality in these fabliaux, see Thomas D. Cooke, Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux: A Study of Their Comic Climax (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), pp. 47, 125.

43 L’Ancien théâtre françois, ed. Viollet Le Duc (Paris: Bibliothèque Elzeverienne; reprint, Paris: P. Jannet, 1854), vol. I, pp. 328–50. In this little play, an impatient curé has an exasperating, literal-minded, headstrong, talkative theology student. In one episode he is sent to invite the priest’s commère to supper – in effect a neighbour’s wife with whom he is having an affair – bearing two figs as a gift. He too stops on the way, examines them, thinks about eating them, eats one, recites his comic rationale, and thanks God the other has escaped a similar fate. When the curé asks what happened to the first, Guillerme confesses, and in response to the question ‘How did you do that?’ he shows him by eating the other one, which leads to threats and near dismissal. Antoine le Métel, Sieur d’Ouville, ‘D’une servante qui mangea deux perdrix’ (Of the servant who ate two partridges), in Élite des Contes, ed. P. Ristelhuber (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, [1643], 1876), no. 23, pp. 40–2, develops the same motif. The maid tells the invited guest who had taken liberties with her that the master intended to cut off his ears, hence his mysterious departure. When her master arrives, having eaten both birds, she may now report that she had sent both birds home with the departed guest. Similar tales can be found among the fabliaux and in the Nouveaux contes à rire (Amsterdam: George Gallet, 1699), p. 266. See Giuseppe Rua, Tra antiche fiabe e novelle (Rome: E. Loescher, 1898), p. 110, which brings us back to Straparola’s story.

44 Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 54–8.

45 See Marie-Françoise Piejus, ‘Le couple citadin-paysan dans les “Piacevoli notti” de Straparola,’ Ville et campagne dans la littérature italienne de la renaissance, ed. Anna Fontes-Baratto et al. (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1976), p. 168.

46 This fabliau has often been reproduced. It occurs in the Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon and Gaston Raynaud, 6 vols. (Paris, 1872; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1964), no. 19, vol. I, pp. 198–219.

47 Les Fabliaux: Études de littérature populaire et d’histoire littéraire du moyen âge (Paris: Édouard Champion [1894], 1925), pp. 236–50. The story of the three chevaliers who all seek to seduce the same married woman, their fates at the hand of the husband, and the ignominious disposal of their bodies in the manner of the three hunchbacks appears among select, perhaps late, versions of the Roman des sept sages de Rome, one of them published in Geneva in 1482. The porter, the woman’s brother, takes a live knight for the corpse making its return, captures him, and burns both horse and rider. The husband and wife then begin to fight in public and in the cross accusations, the wife reveals the crime, making this a further lesson in the treachery of women in accordance with the framing tale of the Seven Sages. According to A. Loiseleur Deslongchamps, the story is taken from a manuscript in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, no. 1309; the text is reproduced in the Appendices to the Roman des Sept Sages in his Essai sur les fables indiennes et sur leur introduction en Europe (Paris: Techener, 1838), pp. 103–10.

48 On the spread of French literary culture in Italy from the early thirteenth century and the influence of the fabliaux writers on the early novellieri, see John Colin Dunlop, History of Prose Fiction, ed. Henry Wilson, 4 vols. (1896; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), vol. II, p. 43.

49 John Colin Dunlop, History of Prose Fiction, ed. Henry Wilson, 4 vols. (1896; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), vol. II, p. 42.

50 Historia septem sapientum, ed. Detlef Roth (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004); or ed. Goerg Buchner, after the Innsbruck manuscript (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1970). This story is not to be found in Johannes de Alta Silva’s Dolopathos nor in any of the French and English versions of the collection. The récit of the sixth sage can also be found in Deux redactions en prose du roman des Sept Sages, published by Gaston Paris, according to Bédier, p. 237, although it is not found generally in the work called Le roman des Sept Sages de Rome. In essence, it is found only in the Latin and Armenian versions of this textual tradition, thus raising questions about its oriental provenance and its relationship to the two very different versions of the story in the Historia and the Mishle.

51 Les Fabliaux, p. 244. Tales of Sendebar, trans. Morris Epstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society of America, 1967), the sixth tale of the wise man; Bédier speaks of an edition by Heinrich Sengelmann in 1842, by which he must mean Das Buch von dem sieben weisen Meistern (Halle: J.F. Lippert, 1842). Also the edition of the Historia septem sapientum (Der sieben weisen meister) by Alfons Hilka is actually the Mishle Sendebar (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1912).

52 Durand, ‘Des trios boçus,’ Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon and Gaston Raynaud, 6 vols. (Paris, 1872; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1964), vol. I, pp. 13–23; Fabliaux ou contes du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, ed. P.J.B. Le Grand d’Aussy (Paris, 1781; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), vol. IV, pp. 241–9. See also Fabliaux Fair and Foul, ed. Raymond Eichmann, trans. John DuVal (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1992), pp. 140–7.

53 Novelle, ed. Giovanni Sinicropi, 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza & Sons, 1972), no. 11, vol. I, pp. 61–7.

54 Erzählungen aus altdeutschen Handschriften, ed. Adelbert von Keller (Stuttgart: Literarischer Verein, 1855), pp. 347ff.

55 ‘Die drî münche von Kolmaere’ (The three monks from Colmar), in Gesammtabenteuer: Hundert altdeutsche Erzählungen: Ritter- und Pfaffen-Mären, Stadtund Dorfgeschichten, Schwänke, Wundersagen und Legenden, ed. Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1850; reprint, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961), no. 62, vol. III, pp. 163–85. Each one of the monks is invited to the house, bashed senseless with a mace, and stashed in a butter tub. One is dragged to the front door and a porter is hired to dump the corpse in the Rhine. Each new one is taken for the first and is more ruthlessly handled until a fourth and still living monk is also killed as one of the preceding victims deemed to have returned to life. This story is rough and heavy fare.

56 (Troyes: Chez Pierre Garnier, 1736). The work is also contained in Jean Salomon Tabarin (Antoine Girard dit Tabarin), Oeuvres complètes de Tabarin, [avec les rencontres, fantaisies et coc-à-l’âne facétieux du baron de Gratelard], ed. Gustav Aventin, 2 vols. (Paris: Jannet, 1868), vol. II, pp. 193ff. Una covata di gobbi, ovvero I tre gobbi della Gorgona con Stenterello, facchino ubriaco (Florence: Salani, 1872) is an Italian farce on the same topic in which Stenterello (The starved), a drunk porter from the piazza, drowns the three humpback brothers one at a time. This farcical play, too, may have had direct debts to Straparola. See Giuseppe Rua, in Intorno alle ‘Piacevoli notti’ dello Straparola (Turin: Loescher, 1890), p. 69.

57 Contes nouveaux et plaisants, par une société (Amsterdam, 1770), pp. 44ff.

58 The Thousand and One Quarters of an Hour or Tartarian Tales, ed. Leonard Smithers (London: H.S. Nichols, 1898), pp. 81–98.

59 A parallel group of texts often cited by Straparola’s commentators may be epitomized by the story of ‘Jean le Pauvre and Jean le Riche’ collected by Emmanuel Cosquin in Contes populaires de Lorraine, 2 vols. (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1887), vol. II, pp. 333–7, a group which may otherwise be passed over as belonging to a quite separate narrative category. They bear superficial resemblances because there are brothers, even hunchbacks, and there is a cadaver that is made to reappear as though refusing to die. But the story follows a fundamentally different order of logic. In particular, there is only one corpse and its exploitation is part of the porter’s scheme to dupe others. In Cosquin’s tale, a poor brother seeks revenge against the rich one for hoarding all the family wealth. He begins by digging up his recently deceased mother and dumping her at his brother’s door. Frightened, the rich one merely pays the poor one to rebury her. The money for removing the body begins to flow. In other versions, her return is attributed to an insufficiently lavish funeral. The old girl wants to be buried with greater pomp and expense. Jean le Pauvre continues to work the unwanted cadaver trick by depositing her first in a baron’s orchard. He too becomes desperate to have her borne away in secret to avoid trouble. The priest behaves likewise and Jean is always there to profit as the willing porter. His last trick is to place her on a mule’s back and send her through the market where merchants throw stones at her to drive her away. Fearing they have killed her, they too open their purses. The shock of it all is Poor Jean’s indifference to his mother’s remains, but perhaps no more so than those who harvest organs from the dead. Cognate tales in this group are numerous and allegedly derive from ‘The Little Hunchback’ in the Arabian Nights, in which the body of the crump is taken from place to place by different persons, each one fearing to be taken for the murderer. See ‘The Tale of the Hunchback with the Tailor, the Christian Broker, the Steward, and the Jewish Doctor,’ The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, ed. J.C. Mardrus and E.P. Mathers, 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 1964), vol. I, pp. 174–80, 268–71. A hunchback taken in by a couple chokes on a fishbone. They deposit the body on the doorstep of the Jewish doctor and then a whole series of receivers think they have killed him by their abuse and so pass the corpse along from party to party. In the end, when a Christian is accused of the murder, the Muslim and the Jew rush in to claim responsibility. The body is then resuscitated by a barber who removes the fishbone. As a source for our story, this tale may be discounted altogether, as well as the many others inventoried by Cosquin, vol. II, pp. 336–7. Stories in this tradition from the early fabliaux include ‘La long nuit,’ and ‘Le sacristan de Cluny,’ both to be found in the major collections.

60 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. 599–601. Collected in Palermo.

61 Vittorio Imbriani, Le novellaja milanese (Bologna: Fava & Garagnani, 1872): ‘Voglio-ffà, Aggio-ffatto e Vene-mm’annetta’ and ‘Il convento delle monache delle fotticchiate.’ These may also be consulted in Il propugnatore, (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1871), vol. IV, pt. 1, pp. 279–81 and Il propugnatore (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1872), vol. V, pt. 1, pp. 146–53.

62 ‘I frati,’ in Novelle popolari toscane, intro. Laura Regina Bruno, 2 vols., Centro Internazionale di Etnostorie (Palermo: Documenta edizioni, 2005), no. 58, vol. I, pp. 321ff.

63 Gennero Finamore, Tradizioni popolari abruzzasi (Lanciano, 1882; Turin: Carlo Clausen, 1894), no. 9.

64 Lettere di Luigi Pulci a Lorenzo il Magnifico et ad altri, ed. Salvatore Bongi (Lucca: Tipografia Giusti, 1868).

65 For those determined to locate the many more versions of this popular tale, the following works are recommended: Gabriel Chappuys, Les facétieuses journées, ed. Michel Bideaux (Paris: Champion, 2003). This work was first published in 1584, and made frequent use of Francesco Sansovino’s Cento novella scelte (Venice, 1561), in which twenty-two of Straparola’s stories were initially included, although ‘The Three Hunchbacks’ was not among them. See also Christian Maximilian Habicht, Tausend und eine Nacht, from a Tunisian manuscript (Breslau: Max, 1825), vol. 14, Night 496; Celio Malespini, Ducento novelle (Venice: Al segno dell’Italia, 1609), pt. I, no. 80, pt. II, no. 95; Nicolas de Troyes, Le grand parangon des nouvelles nouvelles, ed. Émile Mabille (Paris: E. Gouin, 1866; and F. Vieweg in 1869), no. 13, pp. 58–65; new ed. (Bassac: Plein Chant, 1993), no. 13; Les cent nouvelles nouvelles, ed. Roger Dubois (Paris: Champion, 2005), no. 14 (but not in the edition of The Hundred Tales, trans. Rossell Hope Robbins [New York: Crown, 1960], for some bizarre reason); Pierre-Honoré Robbé de Beauveset, Oeuvres badines (London, 1801; and Brussels: J.J. Gay, 1883), no. 56; Cailhava de l’Estendoux, Le Soupé des petits maîtres (Brussels: J.H. Briard, 1870), vol. II, chap. 26; D’Auberville, Contes en Vers (Brussels: Demanet, 1818), vol. II, p. 43; and Michele Angeloni, ‘Il miracolo,’ in Novelle (Lugano: 1863). The tale in Le grand parangon des nouvelles nouvelles is that of an orphan girl and her three beaux. None was sincere and she knew she had to protect her interests. She asks one of them to accompany her to the cemetery to pass the night in an attempt to calm the ghost of her tormented mother. He is to wrap himself in a sheet, and if he remained for three or four hours in prayer for the mother’s soul, he could have his way with her. She tells the second to appear well armed with sticks, and that she was his if he stayed the appointed time. The third agrees to go there dressed as a devil under similar terms. When the ghost sees the armed man, he hides under the raised slab of the tomb. When the devil arrives with fire and chains, the armed one likewise hides under the stone. Then the spirit makes a run for it, which the devil takes for the mother’s ghost. Thus, all of them take to their heels in terror and the girl is freed of all obligations.

66 A. Landes, Contes et legends annamites, in Cochinchine française; Excursions et Reconnaissances, 5 pts. (Saigon, Nov., 1884–Jan., 1886), no. 80.

67 This passage contains some of the most pointed social commentary in the whole of the Piacevoli notti, perfectly integrated into a confrontation between rural helplessness and urban privilege. Her perspective is entirely in keeping with complaint literature of the period, such as the anonymous Alfabeto dei villani (1525), in Antichi testi di letteratura pavana, ed. Emilio Lovarini (Bologna: Romagnoli, 1894), p. 84. See also E. Menegazzo, ‘Stato economico-sociale del Padovano all’ epoca del Ruzante,’ in La poesia rusticana nel rinascimento (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1969), p. 161.

68 An argument has been made for her ‘joie de vivre,’ her stereotypical rural freshness and robustness, her impish delight in tricking her dull contadino, and her pragmatic indifference to the language of fashionable love talk, all of which seems incontestable, even though her motives for consent as a kind of rural acceptance of sexuality as a fact of life as fatalistic as the barnyard itself, or her natural desire to be seduced, remains open to interpretation. See Marie-Françoise Piejus, ‘Le couple citadin-paysan dans les “Piacevoli notti” de Straparola,’ in Ville et campagne dans la littérature italienne de la renaissance, ed. Anna Fontes-Baratto et al. (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1976), pp. 153, 155–6. This article also profiles the military, economic, and political circumstances in the region that brought about such adverse conditions for the rural population.

69 Kenneth Bartlett and Antonio Franceschetti, in their ‘Introduction’ to Angelo Beolco’s La Moschetta (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1993), p. 15, describe Ruzante’s (Beolco’s) world in similar terms: ‘The name of Ruzante remained associated mostly with the life of the country folk and lowest social classes … In a variety of situations [he] depicts such characters and their frustrations and distresses, such as famine, the depredations of invading armies … and the exploitation of rich and powerful landlords. They are people who must often fight just for survival … Love, honour, friendship, loyalty and all other traditional virtues that dignify man find only a casual place in this world. Love becomes a simple outlet for sexual urges …’

70 Le piacevoli notti (Rome: Salerno, 2000), vol. I, p. 392.

71 Ruzante, L’Aconitana (The woman from Ancona), trans. Nancy Dersofi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 38. The date of this play is entirely uncertain, so that, with regard to these lines, the direction of influence can be but speculative.

72 Giuseppe Cocchiara, Le origini della poesia popolare (Turin: p. Boringhieri, 1966), pt. III.

73 Narayana, The Hitopadesa, ed. M.R. Kale (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, [1896], 1967), pp. 59–60. See also the Hitopadésa, ou l’instruction utile, trans. Edouard Lancereau (Paris: P. Jannet, 1855), pp. 102–3.

74 Petrus Alfonsi, The Scholar’s Guide: A Translation of the Twelfth-Century Disciplina clericalis of Pedro Alfonso, ed. Joseph Ramon Jones and John Esten Keller (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1969), p. 13. The story of the vintner and his wife’s prayer for his good eye while her lover makes his escape is recycled in Jean Gobi’s La scala coeli, ed. Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Paris: Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, 1991), no. 509, p. 374.

75 The Scholar’s Guide, pp. 56–60. For an excellent introduction to this text, including sections on the circulation of these stories, what they bear of Eastern wisdom, and how they relate to the emergence of the novella, see the introduction by Eberhard Hermes, The Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 8–35, and 120–2 for the three stories. An alternative entry point for the story of ‘The Sword’ is ‘Of the Officer and the Merchant’s Wife’ in The Book of Sindibad or The Seven Vazirs, in which a slave is on visit as a lover when a second arrives, namely the officer. The wife tells the soldier to draw his sword, pretend to great anger, and leave the house as her husband arrives. The slave is then ‘discovered’ as his intended victim, both men playing out their parts to deceive the husband. Ed. W.A. Clouston ([Glasgow]: Privately Printed (for Subscribers), 1884), pp. 35–7, with a variant version, pp. 148–50. This work is mentioned in Arabic sources as early as 880, and was translated into Greek as Syntipas around 1100 or a decade earlier. All three of Peter Alfonso’s stories are contained in Le castoiement ou instruction du père à son fils, a work originating in the thirteenth century, which is, in fact, the French Disciplina clericalis. It was published in Lausanne by Chaubert and Paris by Claude Herrisant in 1760, pp. 47–53. There are subtle differences; the wife has her husband sit, whereupon she places her mouth over his good eye, telling him not to open it until she said to.

76 These are stories no. 122, ‘Of Ecclesiastical Blindness,’ and no. 123, ‘Of Absence of Parental Restraint,’ so named because of the morals drawn from them at the end of each. Gesta romanorum, trans. Charles Swan and Wynnard Hooper (London: Bohn Library, 1876; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1959), pp. 222–3.

77 English readers may find this tale in The Hundred Tales (the collection is often attributed to Antoine de la Sale), trans. Rossell Hope Robbins (New York: Crown Publishers, 1960), pp. 61–5. This is based on an established anecdote, at least as old as the thirteenth century, for the returning knight blind in one eye appears in ‘Qualiter uxor medicata est oculum mariti’ in Thomas Wright, A Selection of Latin Stories from Manuscripts of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London: Percy Society, 1842), no. 102, p. 91, based on British Library MS. Harleian no. 2851. A later variant on the motif is to be found in Antoine le Métel, Sieur d’Ouville, ‘D’une femme qui subtilement trompa son mari qui étoit borgne’ (Of a wife who subtly cheated her one-eyed husband), in L’Élite des contes, ed. P. Ristelhuber (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre [1643], 1876), no. 21, pp. 37–8. Being married to a one-eyed man, this young wife wondered what she might be missing, so she found a fullsighted lover, but they were trapped by the husband coming up the stairs. She catches him coming in the door, tells her dream about his eye being healed and wants to test it. He indulges her, making light of the whole matter, while the lover sneaks away. Also, ‘D’une femme qui subtillement trompa son mary qui estoit borgne,’ in L’Élite des contes, ed. G. Brunet, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1883), vol. I, pp. 1761–72.

78 ‘Ein Novellenstrauss des XV Jahrhunderts,’ Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 4 (1873), pp. 304–13.

79 ‘Ein schön singets Spil der Förster im Schmaltzkübel,’ Ayrer’s Dramen, ed. Adelbert von Keller in Bibliothek des Literarischen Vereins in Stuttgart 80 (1865), pp. 3063ff.

80 Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon and Gaston Raynaud, 6 vols. in 3 (1872–90; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973), vol. 6, appendix II, pp. 260–3.

81 Tutte le opera, ed. Francesco Flora, 2 vols. ([Milan]: Arnoldo Mondadori [1934], 1952), pt. I, no. 23, pp. 294–302. It is known in German as ‘Die einäugige Amme.’ Italiänischer Novellenschatz, trans. Adelbert Keller (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1851), no. 77, pp. 172–82. Others in this tradition include Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, ‘Marcasino and Pippa,’ in Novelle porretane [sic], ed. Pasquale Stoppelli (L’Aquila: L.U. Japadre editore [1483], 1975), pp. 11–16. (Named after the baths at Porretta.) This merchant’s pretty wife, Pippa, is pursued by Aghinolfo, nephew of the king of France, who had come to Bologna to study. The lover followed the couple into the mountains during a retreat from the plague and there the men became friends. The story is full of touching speeches and social embellishments. When the husband leaves on business, opportunity presents itself, but affairs in the silk industry in Imola go so well that the merchant makes an early return. The lover is told to dress quickly, for Pippa already had a plan. It was to tell her husband of her dream about his blind eye, which she insisted on testing – just a silly notion which demanded his indulgence. Thus the lover makes his escape.

82 ‘Einen einäugigen ritter betreugt seine listige haussfraw’ (A one-eyed knight tricked by his lecherous wife), in Wendunmuth, ed. Hermann Oesterley, 5 vols. (Tübingen: Litterarischen Verein in Stuttgart, 1869), bk. III, no. 242, vol. II, pp. 529–32.

83 Ed. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani (Paris: Librairie générale, 1999), Day I, no. 6, pp. 133–7; The Heptameron, trans. P.A. Chilton (London: Penguin, 1984). This story is taken over by Henri Estienne for his ‘Des larrecins de nostre temps,’ in Apologie pour Hérodote: Satire de la société au XVIe siècle, ed. P. Ristelhuber (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), chap. 15, pp. 207–90.

84 Other tales employing the motif of the visually impaired husband include Francesco Sansovino’s, Cento novelle scelte (Venice: Francesco Rampazetto [1561], 1563, and many subsequent printings), bk. VII, no. 10; La Motte-Roullant, ‘Of the trick played by a certain dame on her husband to let her lover escape, who was hidden in her chamber,’ in Les facetieux de Viz de cent et six nouvelles nouvelles (Paris: Longis, 1550), no. 24; Celio Malespini’s Novelle scelte, ed. Ettore Allodoli (Lanciano: Carabba Editore, 1915), pt. I, no. 44 (first published in Venice: Al segno d’Italia in 1609, as Ducento novelle); and Giovanni Sagredo’s L’Arcadia in Brenta (1687), ed. Quinto Marini (Rome: Salerno, 2004), Day III, pp. 140–4. In this tale a lascivious wife has two lovers who appear at various moments of the night and between whom the wife plays favourites and arouses jealousy. Her husband had a defective eye and was so fearful of the loss of his remaining sight that he made a pilgrimage to Loreto. Upon his return he surprises her during her nocturnal activities. She too resorts to the ruse of testing his good eye while her lover hides behind the door and afterwards makes his escape. See also Johann Gast’s Convivalium sermonum utilibus ac iucundis historiis et sententiis … (Basel: Brylinger, Johann Georgii a Werdenstein, 1554), vol. I, p. 27; and Gabriel Chappuys, Les facétieuses journées, ed. Michel Bideaux (Paris: Champion [1558], 2003), VII, no. 10, pp. 636–46. To these may be added the version by Pietro Fortini in which the lady receives her suspicious husband, tricks him, and then proceeds to tell the trick to him in detail in the form of a story about a lady in Padua just as beautiful as she is who had her scholar lover in the room, but tricked her husband by wrapping up his head in this particular way. By getting her husband to participate in the story, she also manages to have him participate in the reality described by the story, for at that same moment her real lover makes his escape. Le piacevoli e amorose notti dei novizi, ed. Adriana Mauriello, 2 vols. (Rome: Salerno, 1995), III.25, vol. II, pp. 1264–8. Gast’s version is anticipated by that in Ottomaro Luscinio (Othmar Nachtgal), Joci ac sales mire festivi (Augustae Vindelicorum (Augsburg), 1524). The two lovers staged as men in a feud for the returning husband also figure in subsequent French creations, such as in Les ruses d’amour pour render ses favoris contens (Amsterdam: Joli Le Franc, 1681), no. 26, and La farce du poulier, à quatre personage (namely, the master, his wife, her lover, and the neighbour) (Paris: Techener, 1837).

85 The Decameron, trans. Edward Hutton (New York: The Heritage Press [1620], 1940), pp. 317–20. Pietro Fortini, in the ninth of his Novelle (1562), imitates Boccaccio VII.3.

86 This Day of the Decameron is taken up with the many ruses unfaithful women employ to rescue their reputations, in a sense providing a larger context for the present story. In the second novella, Peronella hides her lover in a barrel. When her husband arrives, she concocts a story about selling the barrel, a purchaser for which is already inside inspecting it. Both wife and lover are then permitted to look on amused as the husband struggles to carry the tun to the purchaser’s house. In the third, the wife improvises an explanation for the presence of the priest, who is also the godfather to their child. She pretends to have called him in to diagnose the child’s sudden malaise and to employ a charm to kill off worms around its heart. The credulous husband then finds the priest holding the child, barely back into his robe, and they all join together for supper. In the fifth, a jealous husband, disguised as a priest, hears his wife’s confession concerning her love affairs, but is never able to catch the two of them together. In the sixth, Isabella, having two lovers, deceives her husband by inventing the now familiar pursuit with a weapon motif, similar to the tale told later by Poggio on the formula going back to the Hitopadesa. The seventh is another successful betrayal of a husband who, to catch his wife, assumes her person by donning her clothes to await the lover in the garden – a lover who meanwhile enjoys the lady inside and then descends to the garden to thrash him. The eighth novella is a variation on the Kalila wa Dimna model of the husband who cuts off the nose of his wife’s maid, here reduced to a beating and the lopping off of her hair. Such abuse of the wrong party allows the wife to call in her brothers to discipline her husband. In the ninth, the wife enjoys her lover expressly by following her husband’s commands, duping him in the process. All such tales form part of a huge repertory concerning wives and their wiles in cuckolding their husbands without apprehension or recrimination. All have comparative value in contextualizing Straparola’s story of ‘Marcilio Verzelese’; yet while some are close kin, none are direct sources or sequels.

87 Works, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909; reprint, New York: Octagon, 1969), vol. VII, pp. 237–310.

88 Richard Head and Francis Kirkman, The English Rogue, Described in the Life of Meriton Latroon (London: George Routledge, 1928), pt. III, chap. 16, pp. 588–91.

89 ‘Le conte des petits couteaux,’ Roumania 13 (1884), ed. Paul Meyer and Gaston Paris (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1884), pp. 595–7.

90 A variant on this proverb is ‘Non ti vuol veder persona se non rendi coltellini.’

91 Giovanni Papanti, in his Catalogo dei novellieri italiani in prosa (Livorno, 1871), vol. II, p. 45, lists the little story among those on the ‘Origine del proverbio.’

92 Paul Meyer cites the two following sources. The Italian MS. is cited as Laurentienne, Plut. XC super. no. 89, first edited by Zambrini in his Catalogo della scelta di curiosità letterarie inedite o rare, pubblicata a spese del libraio-editore G. Romagnoli from the year 1861 (Bologna: Romagnoli, 1867). He cites Philippe de Novare from a MS. in the Bibliothèque Nationale Fr. 12581, fol. 401 b. Philippe de Novare, 1195–1265, Les quatre âges de l’homme, ed. Marcel de Fréville (Paris: Firman-Didot, 1888; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprints, 1968). Philippe de Novare’s place is challenged, however, by ‘La femina dei coltellini’ overlooked by Meyer, in Sebastiano Lo Nigro, ed., Novellino e conti del duecento, ‘Libro di novelle e di bel parlare gentile’ (Le novelle antiche dei codici Panchiatichiano-Palatino 138) (Turin: Unione Tipografico-editrice, 1968), no. 2, among the ‘Fragments,’ pp. 237–8. This collection, first published in Bologna in 1525, goes back to the end of the thirteenth century; it includes the tale of the sinful woman who took in pretty knives in exchange for sex but who, in her later years, was obliged to give them all away to maintain the flow of lovers once her youthful charms had faded.

93 Brit. Lib. MS. Harl. 463, no. 168, fol. 20, col. 2.

94 Chaucer’s Major Poetry, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), pp. 390, 392.

95 Trans. Bruno M. Damiani (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1987), esp. pp. 215–32, the quotation to follow is from p. 215.

96 ‘The Rape of the Lock,’ in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1965), I. 51–4, p. 220.