1 The defining features of this ‘genre’ are the employment of magic and the supernatural, roles for speaking animals and imaginary characters, and fantasy settings, but these are of such a varying nature that estimates of the number of ‘fairy tales’ among the stories of the Notti range from as few as fourteen to as many as twenty-one. See Victoria Smith Pozzi, ‘Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti: Narrative Technique and Ideology’ (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 1981), p. 78.

2 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. 16. This contribution will be described in a subsequent section as a unique ‘moment’ in cultural history, and one which Straparola actualized.

3 ‘A Father of the Literary Fairy Tale: Giovanfrancesco Straparola,’ Children’s Literature 32 (2004), pp. 209–15.

4 In Giovan Francesco Straparola, The Nights of Straparola, trans. W.G. Waters (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1894), vol. I, p. xxv.

5 Michèle Simonsen points out the particular and unique value of the tales assembled by Straparola and Basile: ‘These two collections are precious to folklorists because the existence of many of the popular tales is confirmed here for the first time.’ Le conte populaire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984), p. 24.

6 Those ancient and medieval texts cited by Waters and others will prove to be earlier borrowings from the folk traditions Straparola employed and thus rich in comparative value. Nevertheless, none are like Straparola’s tales. To argue that he used them as sources is to argue that he extracted from them versions of some forty narratives with close cognates in the later folk record, a performance not even remotely conceivable.

7 Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 117.

8 The Facetious Nights of Straparola, 4 vols. (London: The Society of Bibliophiles, 1901), vol. IV, p. 237.

9 Pirovano cites the wording from the Register of the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Senato Terra, filza 37, carta 4 in his ‘Nota Biografica,’ vol. I, p. liii. Straparola’s name therein is spelled ‘Zuan Francesco.’ It is telling that his application was not unanimously approved, for five members had voted against it – a foreshadowing, no doubt, of the censorship to come.

10 Pirovano, ‘Nota Biografica,’ vol. I, p. lii.

11 As part of Straparola’s fitting of his stories with the external trappings of the novella, he reassigned his characters with names from a variety of literary sources: Galeotto, Isotta, and Ancillotto from Breton romance; Gabrina, Doralice, and Brunello from chivalric romance; and Salardo, Costanzo, Nerino, Gilfroi, Attarvante, Dambruno, Lucaferro, Guerrino, and Dusolina from the Reali di Francia, with its settings in Turkey, the Balkans, and the Near East. Letterio di Francia, Storia dei generi letterari italiani novellistica, vol. I, Dalle origini al Bandello (Milan: Francesco Vallardi, 1924), pp. 725–6.

12 Among those who considered Straparola as one of the novellieri, and the Notti as a work in the tradition of Boccaccio, are John Colin Dunlop, The History of Prose Fiction, ed. Henry Wilson (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), vol. II, p. 207; Giuseppe Rua, ed., Le piacevoli notti di Messer Gian Francesco Straparola (Rome: Ermanno Loescher, 1898), pp. 1ff.; Robert J. Clements and Joseph Gibaldi, Anatomy of the Novella: The European Tale Collection from Boccaccio and Chaucer to Cervantes (New York: New York University Press, 1977); Manlio Pastore Stocchi, ed., Le piacevoli notti (Bari: Laterza, 1975), p. v; Janet Levarie Smarr, ed., Italian Renaissance Tales (Rochester, MI: Solaris, 1983).

13 The first volume contained twenty-five stories; hence, there were five stories for each of the five evenings. The girls were divided into two groups and the five names for each evening were placed in an urn from which they were drawn out one after the other, thereby establishing the order of presentation. This rather symmetrical design was presumably to have been repeated in the second volume, so that by the end each girl would have recited five tales. Thus the supposition that he initially intended fifty stories – half a Decameron, as it were. That he ended up with forty-eight in the second volume is no doubt due to the fact that the average length of the stories in the first volume is twice that of the stories in the second, so that in order to fill out the latter, new material, including the twenty-two translations out of Morlini, made up the shortfall.

14 Letterio di Francia was exercised in particular by this apparent decline, for despite the work’s integrated conception and design ‘fu iniziata bene, proseguita male e finite pessimamente, con l’oscenitä della material e con un plagio disonesto, inverecondo, sfacciato’ (though it began well, it grew worse, and finished badly, with obscene materials and plagiarism which was dishonest, shameless, and impudent). Storia dei generi letterari italiani: Novellistica (Milan: Vallardi, 1924), vol. I, p. 731.

15 Ruth Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 93–4. It may be added that the first seventy-eight of his novelle, published in Lucca in 1554 in three volumes, originated in Mantua and Milan between 1506 and 1524. The second group was written in Verona between 1526 and 1527, and the last group in France before 1541, published posthumously in Lyons in 1573. Of the first group, sixty-three of the seventy-eight novelle were historical. There would seem to be little probability that Straparola and Bandello knew each other’s work.

16 Pirovano, Piacevoli notti (Rome: Salerno, 2000), vol. I, p. 9n6.

17 Pirovano, Piacevoli notti, vol. I, p. 9n4.

18 Manlio Pastore Stocchi, in his introduction to Le piacevoli notti (Bari: Laterza, 1975), p. v, says the girls are of uncertain ethical and social definition. They are there to carry out four social rituals: singing, dancing, storytelling, and riddles.

19 Basile treated the participation of these ideal beauties with their impeccable talents not only as a convention but a cliché, which he parodied eighty-five years after Straparola with his ten ancient and ugly women participants.

20 Dialogo dei giochi (Siena: Accademia Senese degli Intronati, 1982), p. 220. Bargagli does not date the origin of this practice, again leaving open the question of whether Straparola’s social representation in the framing tale was taken from life or whether it was an invention that was later imitated.

21 This fact is made particularly ironic by the degree to which Waters comes to the defense of Straparola in just such matters in his ‘Introduction’: ‘In few of the collections of a similar character is there to be found so genuine a vein of comedy, and for the sake of this one may perhaps be permitted to beg indulgence for occasional lapses – lapses which are assuredly fewer in number and probably not more lax in character than those of novelists of greater fame.’ In spite of this apology, Waters saw fit to alter them to avoid offending Victorian tastes. The Nights of Straparola, 2 vols. (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1894), vol. I, p. xix.

22 N.M. Penzer, ed., The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, trans. Benedetto Croce, 2 vols. (1932; reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), ‘Preface,’ p. xlviii.

23 He says literally that the stories in the two volumes are ‘not mine’ (non siano mie), but ‘those from whom I have thievishly stolen them’ (ma da questo, et quello ladronescamente rubbate). Thus ‘I cannot possibly claim them as my own without lying. Nevertheless, I faithfully wrote them down in precisely the manner in which they were recited by the ten young ladies’ (fedelmente scritte secondo il modo che furono da dieci damigelle nel concistorio raccontate).

24 The Nights of Straparola, 2 vols. (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1894), ‘Introduction,’ p. xxvi.

25 Sannazaro, Arcadia & Piscatorial Eclogues, trans. Ralph Nash (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), p. 65.

26 For further details on these compositions, see Cathy Ann Elias, ‘Musical performance in 16th-century Italian literature: Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti,’ Early Music 17, no. 2 (1989), pp. 161–74.

27 What the Boccaccian framing tale had been during three centuries of efflorescence would entail a lengthy enquiry, but it began in what may be referred to as the ‘disaster cornice’ in which the storytellers are in refuge from some catastrophe – such as the Florentine plague of 1348, in the case of the Decameron, down to the twenty rescapés from the sack of Rome in 1527 who, aboard a ship, perform the tales that make up the Héptameron of Marguerite de Navarre. New formulas, however, appear in Parabosco’s Diporti (1552), in which several famous men, including Aretino, go hunting and fishing along the lagoon and are forced indoors by three days of inclement weather, where they wile away the time telling the stories that form the collection. This idea for a frame was contemporary with Straparola’s. Sabadino degli Arienti’s Porrettane (1483) purports to be the tales he heard at the baths of Porretta as recited by a gracious company of noble men and women. The practice of framing tales within increasingly diversified contemporary situations was well established by the mid-sixteenth century. Each one appeals to historical possibility, as though the stories told were the products of an actual event. Straparola follows suit.

28 The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), p. 3. This work was originally published in Venice in 1528, frequently printed thereafter, and translated into several European languages, including English, The Courtyer of Count Baldesssar Castilio, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London, 1561).

29 Castiglione’s account of the courtly life of Urbino, however, is merely a convenient point of reference, for the organized activities of polite society did not begin there. Giovanni da Prato, in his Paradiso degli Alberti, written in Florence in 1389, contextualized his stories in the garden of a villa amid dancing and music, in full anticipation of all that was to follow. See the edition by Alessandro Wesselofsky, 4 vols. (Bologna: G. Romagnoli, 1867).

30 The work was first published in Siena by Luca Bonetti in 1572, but was reprinted in Venice in 1574, 1575, 1581, 1591, and 1598 in witness of its popularity and influence, and of the activities which it fostered.

31 This discussion comes at the very end of the treatise, Dialogo de’ giuochi, ed. Patrizia D’Incalci Ermini (Siena: Accdemia senese degli Intronati, 1982), pp. 218–30.

32 Further to this work, see Lina Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, trans. Jeremy Parzen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 117–19.

33 Ringhieri was Bolognese, and the work was published there by the printer-publisher Anselmo Giaccarelli in 1551, before it was taken to Venice for new editions in 1553 and 1558. It was dedicated to Caterina de’ Medici (the queen of France). For a further description of this and related works, see Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century (1920; reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1971), pp. 285–90.

34 ‘La culture en jeu: Innocenzo Ringhieri et la Pétrarquisme,’ Les jeux à la renaissance, ed. Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982), pp. 185–200.

35 Giuoco piacevole (Mantua: Presso Giacomo Ruffinello, 1574).

36 Each day has a new ‘gallant lady’ or ‘gentleman cavalier’ as leader. The company engages in a great deal of banter and love play. Day six is given over to it entirely, while day five had been devoted to the disorderly lives of monks and nuns. There were forty-nine works in all.

37 Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century (1920; reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1971), chap. 6, pp. 263–322, which also contains a brief account of the framing-tale society in Straparola’s Nights, pp. 292–4. Crane, for example, describes the Discorsi of Annibale Romei and the games and recitations performed at the Este court (ca. 1578) with the countess of Scandiano as the Queen of the Games (p. 231), as well as the activities of several of the polite gatherings described in the novelle of Bandello; for example, the group of Venetians who convened in the palazzo of Signor Cesare Fregoso in Verona (pt. II, no. 10), where they are treated to a Lucullian banquet followed by dancing, games, a discussion of the Decameron, and storytelling of their own (p. 249). All such descriptions extend the portrait of the social world which Straparola recreates as the context for his tales.

38 Orazio Vecchi, Le veglie di Siena (The night games of Siena), ed. Donald Beecher (Ottawa: The Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2004). Other musicians of the era were instrumental in bringing folk music to high culture, such as Luca Marenzio, who introduced both ‘Girometta’ and ‘La bella Franceschina’ into his madrigals along with other musical representations based on the canti carnascialeschi – carnival songs in which members of the trade classes sing of their wares and occupations, often in a state of inebriation.

39 Joseph Bédier, for example, made an assault on the one-locale theory concerning the origins of complex folk tales and promoted the theory of ‘polygenesis.’ Slicing between these choices does not greatly affect an appraisal of Straparola in relation to the great labyrinth of implied stemmata representing the spread and interrelationships of these stories. But the argument that the same complex story could originate in several places, as opposed to dissemination through memory and orality from a single source, seems intuitively less logical or possible. Joseph Bédier, Les fabliaux: Études de literature populaire et d’histoire littéraire du moyen âge (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1893).

40 Both are distinguished from historia, which, at least in terms of persons, places, and events, professes actually to have happened in real times and locations, despite elements of confabulation.

41 Stefano Calabrese grapples with this issue in defining the word fiabe. Tales are stories outside of official culture, less realistic, often employing magic; they are tolerant of distortion, of things that are impossible, serving as toys of the imagination. Gli arabeschi della fiaba (Pisa: Pacini, 1984), pp. 39ff. A more sustained study of the folk tale is Max Lüthi’s The European Folktale: Form and Nature, trans. John D. Niles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). He seeks to anatomize the genre by its generic characteristics, using such terms as ‘one-dimensionality’ in the mingling of the natural and supernatural in a single world; ‘depthlessness,’ or the absence of psychological motivation or life histories of the characters; ‘abstract style,’ a plain, essential narrative style without embellishment and metaphor; ‘isolation and universal interconnection,’ or a lack of long relationships that bring about character growth; and ‘sublimation and all-inclusiveness,’ or an archetypal scope with thematic potential because of the lack of limitations imposed by realism (p. 73). Many of Straparola’s tales find apt description in these terms.

42 The Pentamerone, trans. Benedetto Croce, 2 vols. (1932; reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. xlviii; Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmächen (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1856), vol. III, p. 291.

43 Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; reprint, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 131.

44 Trans. Jack Lindsay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), p. 142.

45 The critic to read on the corruption of folk literature through literary transcription is Albert Wesselski in his Versuch einer Theorie des Märchen, Prager Deutsche Studien 45 (Reichenberg: F. Kraus, 1931). He is followed in this stance by Michèle Simonsen in Le conte populaire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984), p. 19. See also Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 23.

46 That oral is distinct from written narrative is not so much a matter of its contents as of its mode of production and the formal particularities that inhere in oral literature because of its techniques of transmission. Many of these features are preserved in the literary transcriptions of oral literature. The matter has been much investigated from the time of Milman Parry, whose theories were brought into full view by Albert B. Lord in The Singer of Tales (1960; reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Their combined analysis of the singer’s attachment to tradition, the use of poetic formulas, the levels of mastery, the schemata for retention, and the shaping of the work through these processes has established the terms of discussion for all subsequent generations of scholars. They were principally concerned with epic traditions and the orality of Homer, but many of the principles pertain to the orality of shorter forms in the popular tradition, including works in prose.

47 Giuseppe Rua, despite his grasp of Straparola’s connection to folk culture, viewed him essentially as one of the novellieri – and one of the least notable, particularly in his failure to study sentiment and the creation of interiorized characters, separating him from Grazzini, Bandello, and Giraldi. Tra antiche fiabe e novelle: Le piacevoli notti di Messer Gian Francesco Straparola (Rome: Ermanno Loescher, 1898), p. 111.

48 Gabriel Chappuys, Les facetieuses journées, ed. Michel Bideaux (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), p. 129 (my translation).

49 Storia della letteratura italiana (Milan: Vallardi, 1906), p. 351 (my translation).

50 Much of far greater specificity than can be offered here on the spread of folk tales in the Renaissance is to be found in Peter Burke’s chapter on ‘The Transmission of Popular Culture’ in his Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 91–115, concerning the professional and amateur raconteurs, their ubiquity, their repertories, and their audiences. For the important part played by women, including the proverbial ‘old wives,’ in the transmission of folk tales, see Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), ‘The Old Wives’ Tale: Gossips I,’ pp. 12–25.

51 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

52 James M. Taggart, Enchanted Maidens, p. 36.

53 Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 138.

54 On these matters, see Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1997); and Thomas L. Charlton et al., eds., Handbook of Oral History (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006), esp. Elinor Maz, ‘Memory Theory,’ and Mary Chamberlain, ‘Publishing Oral History: Oral Exchange and Print Culture.’

55 The image is made in reference to Somadeva’s great tenth- or eleventh-century Sanskrit story anthology, the Katha sarit sagara (The ocean of the streams of stories). The overtones of this title are of a collection that represents the cumulative stories of a people, each told as a variant on the preceding story, progressing systemically through all the phases of human nature, human institutions, and memorable social challenges. It is as though for everything there is a story and that when all stories are told, the anatomy of the species is made manifest.

56 His recent yet seminal study, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), is a source of valuable perspectives on the antiquity and transmission of popular literature, the Latin (thus learned) heritage, and the challenge of nomenclature and story taxonomy.

57 Ruth Bottigheimer represents a dissenting view in ‘consciously reject[ing] a deeply ingrained and widespread prejudice against the concept of the literary creation of tales that have long been defined as quintessentially “folk” in nature.’ She does so ‘because no evidence supports that belief, despite the nearly universal assumption that authors like Straparola “appropriated popular lore” (Zipes 1997, 1800), imitated “origini orale” [sic] (Mazzacurati 1971, 77–81 passim), or wrote down oral tradition (Pozzi 1981, 20).’ Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 6. Her principal objective is to assert Straparola’s authorship of the several ‘rising’-type fairy tales in which paupers become rich and marry princesses, such as XI.1, ‘Constantino,’ a prototype for ‘Puss in Boots.’ Bottigheimer’s views have been published in a long article entitled ‘Fairy Godfather, Fairy-Tale History, and Fairy-Tale Scholarship: A Response to Dan Ben-Amos, Jan M. Ziolkowski, and Francisco Vaz da Silva,’ in the Journal of American Folklore 123, no. 490 (2010), pp. 447–96. The larger question is whether the fairy tale, per se, is a literary invention and a product of Renaissance book culture or a genre of the folk with mysterious origins reaching back to antiquity. This debate has served to bring Straparola to the centre among folklorists in recent years. Jack Zipes, in The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre, goes beyond this immediate debate to explore the qualities of the fairy tale in relation to the origins of story as a phylogenetic human characteristic representing our deepest motives for communication, our earliest capacities for imaginative play, the preservation of our cultural ‘memes’ through their competitive appeal on the basis of their evolutionary adaptation to human nature, and our long-standing practice of inventing imaginative tales of places and beings that never existed, yet which compel our deepest attention. At the end, however, he returns specifically to the discussion concerning the sixteenth-century literary origin of fairy tales proposed by Bottigheimer in his Appendix A, ‘Sensationalist Scholarship: A “New” History of Fairy Tales,’ The Irresistible Fairy Tale (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 157–73, in which he provides a summary of the accumulating evidence supporting the antiquity of wonder tales with and without fairies and their anonymous shaping through the practices of oral culture reaching back into the Middle Ages and beyond. It has been a bracing polemic.

58 Thus, on occasion, I make use of Carl Wilhelm von Sydow’s oikotype as a useful term designating the ‘home’ type. It carries critical baggage of its own, because it assumes that tales begin with a master version from which all the others spread out, fitting themselves into their respective eco-niches. The term was first applied to generic plants which later became diversified through the pressure of new environments. It is a valuable model for thinking about the organic processes of ‘meme’ survival in human memory – of stories that cheer and find repetition, or that cloy and die, or that in their complexity defy memory and redelivery. But oikotype does not here, as it may have for its founder, signify an Ur-tale, for there is no certainty that such tales ever existed in full original versions. Even so, it is useful at times to speak of a ‘home’ type when there are distinct branches splitting off at historical moments from a common source. This will become clear in the history of ‘the three brothers’ type (VII.5), and the complex relationship the mutants maintain with their common source, including Straparola’s variant.

59 Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 132.

60 Giancarlo Mazzacurati in ‘La narrativa di Giovan Francesco Straparola e l’ideologia del fiabesco,’ All’ombra di Dioneo: Tipologie e percorsi della novella da Boccaccio a Bandello, ed. Matteo Palumbo (Florence: La nuova Italia [Scandicci], 1996), pp. 151–2. This is echoed by Ute Heidmann as ‘an epistemological problem that arises when tales are systematically treated as folklore according to their types’ insofar as this reductionist approach for the sake of classification impoverishes the grounds for comparative study or ‘dialogue intertextuel.’ Textualité et intertextualité des contes (Paris: Garnier classiques, 2010), pp. 20, 37, 40.

61 G.F. Straparola, Le piacevoli notti, ed. Giovanni Macchia (1943; reprint, Milan: Bompiano, 1952), ‘Introduction,’ p. x (my translation). The spirit of Macchia’s commission was anticipated sixty years earlier by W.G. Waters, who stated in his ‘Introduction’ that ‘it is hard to say what new and strange fruits may not be gathered from the wide field now covered by the folk-lorist. Formerly he hunted only in the East; now we find him among the Lapps and the Zulus – in Labrador, and in the South Pacific as well. A still more extended search will very likely find a fresh source for those of the fables in the “Notti” which have heretofore been classed as the original work of Straparola, and will discover for us a new and genuine author of “Puss in Boots.”’ The Nights of Straparola (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1894), vol. I, p. xxvi.

62 There is concurrence in this view on the part of Graham Anderson. Writers who borrow from the oral tradition take on their motifs and character types, yet ‘very little attention has been paid to the depth and extent of their borrowings and the intercultural layers of their tales.’ Thus, he deemed the work of locating sources and analogues as ‘extremely important’ if we want to know how the genre of the fairy tale emerged and stabilized itself. Fairy Tales and the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2000), p. xii.

63 I am referring to his book The Shakespearean Moment and Its Place in the Poetry of the 17th Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954).

64 Donato Pirovano adds a substantial dimension to the construction of that moment in his account of the Venetian book publishing industry at mid-century in ‘Una storia editoriale cinquecentesca: “Le piacevoli notti” di Giovan Francesco Straparola,’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 177 (2000), pp. 542–9. Venice was the European leader in publishing, catering not only to a wealthy public at home, but to a widespread clientele in a number of specialized areas. The censors became more active beginning in 1543, but traditionally it had been a city free of repression. ‘In questo clima un oscuro personaggio di Caravaggio’ (in this climate [of production] an obscure person from Caravaggio …) (p. 542) published his collection of ‘novelle.’ Pirovano recreates that publishing moment in great detail.

65 Much has been written on the ‘work’ of fairy tales in terms of the issues they take up that are of vital interest to the well-being of groups, regulating norms, seeking equity in the face of illiberal mores, and alleviating fear while inculcating the survival virtues of benefit to the group. Gerhard Kahlo in Die Wahrheit des Märchens (Halle: Niemeyer, 1954), pp. 14ff, provides a list of his own: the meanings of rituals, customs and laws, family power relations, dynastic and clan pressures, the place of the firstborn, bride selection, magic children, the transformation of people into plants and animals, the intervention of non-human creatures in human society, and the spirit animation of nature.

66 J.A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 324.

67 Narziss an der Quelle: Das romantische Kunstmärchen (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1977), p. 12.

68 Further to the definition of the wonder tale, see M.-L. Tenèze, ‘Du conte merveilleux comme genre,’ Revue des Arts et traditions populaires (1970), pp. 11–65. Michele Rak also adopted a similar usage in the case of Basile. See his ‘Il sistema dei racconti nel Cunto de li cunti di Basile,’ in Giovan Battista Basile e l’invenzione della fiaba, ed. Michelangelo Picone and Alfred Messerli (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2004), p. 14.

69 Raymonde Robert, Le conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Nancy: Presses universitaires, 1982), p. 39. While honouring Robert’s distinction, I remain amenable to the arguments made by Jan Ziolkowski in his perceptive study, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), in which he sets out to show that certain tales told by the Grimm Brothers were the same tales, essentially, as were told in twelfth-century Latin manuscripts, referred to as ‘The Donkey’s Tale,’ ‘The Turnip Tale,’ and ‘One-Ox.’ To make his point, he allowed that the nomenclature appointed to the later tales may apply equally to the medieval tales. In the generic sense of the term, they are fairy tales. But it is revealing that in the subtitle to his book, he redefines them as favole.

70 Ute Heidmann and Jean-Michel Adam, Textualité et intertextualité des contes: Perrault, Apulée, La Fontaine, Lhéritier (Paris: Garnier classiques, 2010), p. 37. She is asserting on behalf of the French authors and founders of the conte de fées the same degree of originality and independence from their sources as Bottigheimer sought to establish on Straparola’s behalf concerning the oral culture. That Raymonde Robert describes de Murat’s borrowing from Straparola as larceny is the kind of tarring which Heidmann seeks to dilute in her theory of generic reconfiguration.

71 For a more formal definition of the ‘wonder tale,’ see Vladimir Propp, Theory and History of Folklore, trans. Adriana and Richard Martin, ed. Anatoly Liberman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 65–123.

72 Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), p. 20. In support of a middle view, Zipes states that ‘just a superficial glance back into history will tell us that fairy tales have been in existence as oral folk tales for thousands of years and first became what we call literary fairy tales toward the end of the seventeenth century’ (p. 2). I can live with that.

73 The former published (New York: Norton, 2001), the latter (New York: Norton, 2002).

74 The adoption of the term ‘wonder’ carries overtones of a different kind, explored by Suzanne Magnanini in her study entitled Fairy-Tale Science: Monstrous Generation in the Tales of Straparola and Basile. The tales are indeed ‘wondrous’ in their evocations, linking them potentially to the age of meraviglie, the cabinet de curiosité or wunderkabinette, and the world of Pare’s monsters and prodigies – the anomalies of nature. While few of the stories discuss natural anomalies per se, such as ‘Of Filomena the Hermaphrodite Nun’ (XIII.9), ‘wonder’ remains an open signifier, taking in the supernatural elements of the proto-fairy tales, to be sure, even though they belong to a different order of the imagination. Magnanini states at the outset of her study that ‘not all early modern meraviglie were created equal’; her work explores that diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 20. The ‘wonder tale,’ in all its Manichean confrontations and hyperbolical agents, may provoke a kind of amazement, although differing, arguably, from the emotional shiver of the monstrous, the horrible, or the sublime. Paradoxically, even the conversion of Filomena from female to male, or into a hermaphrodite through a medical procedure performed in public, aroused neither shock nor amazement, but laughter (XIII.9). Straparola’s wonder tales are of a new order, eliciting the responses that pertain to realms of the impossible, suffusing the imagination with the novelty and enchantment characteristic of select folk tales. If Straparola’s work, in this regard, becomes a ‘statement’ about the scientific ethos of his age, it must do so largely by offering up folk narratives to audiences culturally inclined to read the stories in just those terms, for otherwise they remain the same old folk tales without overt scientific promptings. Meanwhile, the sixteenth-century readers’ response records remain a silent night. They were interested in tales and in monstrosity. Whether the latter interest of a scientific and superstitious kind was brought hermeneutically to bear on the fantastic creatures and anomalies of nature in these tales is a moot point. Certainly it was possible.

75 ‘I am perfectly willing to inform the reader of two things: the first is that I took the ideas for certain of these tales from an ancient author [his work] entitled The Comic Nights of Mr. Straparola, imprinted for the sixteenth time in 1615 [the French edition]. These stories were apparently quite in vogue during the preceding century because there are so many editions. The ladies who have written before now in this genre [her associates d’Aulnoy and Lhéritier] have been mining the same source, at least for the greatest part [of their work].’ ‘Avertissement,’ in Histoires sublimes et allégoriques, dédiez aux Fées Modernes, 1699 (my translation). The ‘modern fairies’ referenced in the title were, again, d’Aulnoy, Lhéritier, and the members of their writing circle.

76 The question of readership as determined by class had arisen with regard to sotties, facetiae, and fabliaux. Who were they for? Joseph Bédier in Les fabliaux favoured the mercantile classes (the middle class did not yet exist per se), whereas Per Nykrog in Les fabliaux believed they were intended for the aristocracy. Both infer that the stories are shaped by authorial intentionality in relation to their audiences. The former was published (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1894), the latter (Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1957).

77 Victoria Smith Pozzi, ‘Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti: Narrative Technique and Ideology’ (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 1981), passim.

78 See Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), esp. pp. 39–42.

79 Folktales and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), pp. 27, 65–6.

80 Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), pp. 22–3. Zipes, in this same work, concurs that such tales may speak for the disenfranchised and marginal. That Bakhtinian stance (he is not mentioned in the book) is implicit in the statement that ‘folk and fairy tales have always spread word through their fantastic images about the feasibility of utopian alternatives, and this is exactly why the dominant social classes have been vexed by them.’ (London: Heinemann, 1977), p. 3.

81 Vittore Branca maintained that the novella targeted the bourgeois or mercantile spectrum of readers and that this was deliberate on the part of the writers. It was literature by, for, and mostly about this emerging class. Boccaccio medievale (Florence: Sansoni, 1964), pp. 71–99. Behind the argument are varying interpretations of the notion of class, a notion which, before the nineteenth century, was quasi- anachronistic.

82 Pietro Bembo, Prosa della vulgar lingua (1525), in Opere in volgare, ed. Mario Marti (Florence: Sansoni, 1961), pp. 334–40.

83 ‘The Language of Madness in the Renaissance,’ Yearbook of Italian Studies 1 (1971), p. 208.

84 Nancy Canepa, From Court to Forest (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), p. 54.

85 Stephen Greenblatt speaks of the damage done to folk culture by the elite who sap it of its vitality, freeze it into formulae, fix it by conventions, and surround it with words. Learning to Curse: Essays in Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 68. Straparola must plead guilty if such is a sin, although folk culture also feeds on the printed. Moreover, while one may criticize the sterility and rigidity of the literary imitation, the folk culture from which it is derived goes blithely along undiminished, for acts of appropriation alter nothing in the cultures from which they borrow. Folk culture is not a quantity subject to deletion when its stories are borrowed, nor is it dismantled by transcription into print. It is true, however, that folk culture as a universal donor has been displaced in recent decades, not so much by books as by technology, cataclysmic world events, the media, and changing social mores and structures that have destroyed the mentalities, practices, and contexts by which it was fostered. That is a different matter. Jack Zipes concurs with Greenblatt, however, in Breaking the Magic Spell (London: Heinemann, 1977), passim, that the folk tale, once it is commercialized or adapted to the ends of the elite or the masses, becomes an eviscerated instrument of collective truth. This has been much theorized in recent years. Walter Benjamin made much of the ‘realm of living speech’ and of the damage done to oral narrative by the book as a product of nineteenth-century capitalism. ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), vol. III, p. 146. Books contain only dead narratives, whereas orality alone builds stories within living communities. Even Jacques Derrida involved himself in this dichotomy on the side of the lived experience of ‘aphoristic energy’ as opposed to the ‘encyclopedic protection’ of lifeless matter in books indifferent to gesture and storytelling, in Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 18. Straparola does not have to bear the entire brunt of the matter, although he was decidedly among the earliest to turn popular culture into book culture, and what is worse, to deliver it to the elite for their own social ends.

86 For a contrasting view of the enigma, see Stefano Calabrese, who attempts to bring a kind of unity to the collection by associating the cognitive demands placed upon the reader by the riddle with the demands imposed by the sometimes inconclusive endings to a very few of the stories, such as VII.5 in which no choice is made of a husband, or VI.4 wherein no choice is made among the contestants seeking to become the next abbess. Whether riddles call upon the same social problem solving computations elicited by the stories is a point for discussion; there is a loose resemblance. More certain is that both fables and enigmas inspired communal guessing, conversation, and amusement among the members of the cornice or framing-tale society in an ambience of contained competition. Gli arabeschi della fiaba (Pisa: Pacini, 1984), pp. 44ff. For yet other ideas, see Elli Köngas Maranda, Theory and Practice of Riddle Analysis (Urbino: Università di Urbino, 1972).

87 The Gallery of Memory, trans. Jeremy Parzen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).

88 Roger D. Abrahams and Alan Dundes, ‘Riddles,’ Folklore and Folklife, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 131. The allusion is to Robert A. Georges and Alan Dundes, ‘Toward a Structural Definition of the Riddle,’ Journal of American Folklore 76 (1963), pp. 111–18.

89 For a contrasting view, see Manlio Pastore Stocchi, who agrees that obscenity was part of the enigma culture, but that the girls who recited them were innocent and reclaimed their propriety in all sincerity. The tittering among the auditors, essentially the men, was provoked by ambiguous signifiers which the Signora seeks to expunge as part of her essential social role. Nevertheless, we, the readers, have had those double signifiers thrust upon us as part of the book’s culture, bringing Stocchi to such terms as ‘constitutional ambiguity’ and ‘hypocrisy.’ Straparola, Le piacevoli notti (Bari: Laterza, 1975), p. xi. There were others like Giuseppe Pitrè who, for the obscenity of these little poems, was against publishing them. Indovinelli, dubbi, scioglilingua del popolo siciliana (Turin: C. Clausen, 1898), pp. xxi–xxviii.

90 Giuseppe Rua, ed., Le Piacevoli notti di Messer Gian Francesco Straparola (Rome: E. Loescher, 1898), p. 130.

91 Andrew Welsh, ‘Riddles,’ in Medieval Folklore, ed. Carl Lindahl et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 343.

92 M. de Filippis, ‘Straparola’s Riddles,’ Italica 24, no. 2 (June 1947), p. 136. His impression was that Straparola mitigated the obscene effect by mixing the nice with the nasty and by surrounding his creations with polite conversation. The Literary Riddle in Italy to the End of the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), pp. 13–17. Moreover, riddles are associated with carnival, as in Straparola, and thus with a period of licence.

93 Introduction to Antonio Malatesti, La sfinge: enimmi (Lanciano: Carabba editore, ca. 1910), p. i.

94 M. de Filippis, ‘Straparola’s Riddles,’ Italica 24, no. 2 (June 1947), p. 136.

95 Giuseppe Rua, ed., Le piacevoli notti di Messer Gian Francesco Straparola (Rome: Loescher, 1898), p. 130.

96 Carlo Lapucci, ed., Il libro degli indovinelli italiani (Milan: Garzanti Editore, 1994).

97 Giuseppe Rua, ‘Di alcune stampe d’indovinelli,’ in Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari (Palermo, 1888), vol. VII, pp. 427–65.

98 Pirovano, Le piacevoli notti, vol. II, p. 760 describes the beast as an imaginary quadruped similar to a basilisk, able to kill by its glance, localized to western Ethiopia near the source of the Niger River. The name is Greek, meaning ‘low-looking,’ because of its oversized, heavy-hanging head. The reference in Pliny is in the Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938–63), vol. VIII, p. 32. This is one of several enigmas in the collection involving animals – a favourite topic. See also I.4, III.4, IV.3, IV.4, V.1, and XIII.1.

99 Petrarch’s Songbook, trans. James Wyatt Cook (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1996), no. 135, ll. 31–8, p. 197.

100 That was Rua’s impression of Straparola’s more humble enterprise, while Parabosco in his Diporti was merely repeating the stale conceits and vocabulary of the love poets. Tra antiche fiabe e novelle, vol. I, Le Piacevoli notti, ed. Giuseppe Rua (Rome: E. Loescher, 1898), p. 130.

101 This elusive work was also published in Mantua as Academia di Enimmi di Madonna Dafne di Piazza agli academici fiorentini suoi amante. It is quoted by Rua in his edition of Le piacevoli notti (Rome, 1890), p. 133, and by De Filippis in ‘Straparola’s Riddles,’ Italica 24, no. 2 (June 1947), p. 143. The author is Maddalena Sigiuzzi, born in Piazza, Sicily in 1499. That others in the collection hold similar alignments with Madonna Dafne, such as IX.4 (Madonna Dafne, no. 57), XI.4 (Madonna Dafne, no. 14), XIII.2 (Madonna Dafne, no. 63), and XIII.9 (Madonna Dafne, no. 71), would indicate that the authoress draws upon our author, or that for those in Straparola’s second volume (1553), that he draws upon her. But a far more plausible suggestion is that both, almost simultaneously, are drawing upon a common repertoire of enigmas in wide circulation in the popular culture.

102 Giuseppe Rua, ed., Le piacevoli notti di Messer Gian Francesco Straparola (Rome: E. Loescher, 1890), p. 132. Il Resoluto is Angiolo Cenni, one of the founders of the Rozzi Academy. The Sonetti del Risoluto [sic] were first published in 1546.

103 The most comprehensive list of Straparola’s borrowings in the enigma department may be pieced together from the annotations in Pirovano’s edition of the Notti (Rome: Salerno, 2000). He cites a number of parallel texts from Madonna Dafne and Resoluto. But XI.4 by Resoluto is also in Madonna Dafne, so that, again, the currency of such enigmas in the popular culture provides a more plausible explanation than direct literary borrowing on Straparola’s part; such cases, for the curious, require closer study.

104 M. de Filippis, ‘Straparola’s Riddles,’ Italica 24, no. 2 (June 1947), p. 146.

105 Giorgio Boscardi made a stylistic analysis of the Notti and concluded that it is the same well-balanced, calm, clear, and measured prose throughout. ‘Le novelle di G.F. Straparola,’ Rassegna Lucchese 8 (1952), pp. 2–7.

106 Further information about this printer (Comino Giolito Ferrari) may be gleaned from ‘La marca tipografica di Comin da Trino,’ Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 65 (1990), pp. 162–74.

107 Both Pirovano and Bottigheimer offer speculations, following upon those by Giuseppe Rua and Steno Zanandrea. For a summary see Bottigheimer’s Fairy Godfather, p. 107. One suggestion was that he was a member of the Danza family. Rua calls him ‘editore,’ while Pirovano calls him ‘finanziatore/promotore.’ But he may be Straparola’s invention, used as a means to write his own apology as though from an independent party. The address to the ladies in the second volume, now in Straparola’s own name, uses many of the same rhetorical ploys.

108 His findings were published in a long article entitled ‘Per l’edizione de la Piacevoli notti di Giovan Francesco Straparola,’ Filologia e Critica 26 (2001), pp. 60–93.

109 For technical information on this printer, see P. Veneziani, ‘La marca tipografica di Comin da Trino,’ Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1990), pp. 162–73.

110 Further to the ecclesiastical tribunals, censorship, and the Venetian Press, see Paul Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press 1540–1605 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Grendler explains how a book was sent first to an inquisitor or his delegate who examined the work for doctrinal or moral errors, p. 151. Next it was sent to the public reader, looking for political content. Finally, the book was taken to the ducal secretary to assure that prevailing policies of state were not contradicted.

111 Giuseppe Rua’s edition of Straparola was published three times, first as Le ‘piacevoli notti’ de Messer Gian Francesco Straparola (Rome: Ermanno Loescher, 1898), with an introduction of 136 pages, then as Le piacevoli notti di M. Giovanfrancesco Straparola (Bologna: Romagnoli-dell’Acqua, 1899–1908), and again simply as Le piacevoli notti, 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1927), this last edition without the enigmas. To complicate this report, Rua wrote his ‘Intorno alle “Piacevoli notti” della Straparola’ for Italiana 15 (1890), pp. 111–51, in anticipation of his full introduction. For the complete reference and the second half, see the bibliography.

112 Roman Legends: A Collection of the Fables and Folktales of Rome (Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1877), p. viin1. Campbell is the editor of the collection of tales from the West Highlands mentioned in several of the subsequent annotations; he thought that copies of the Piacevoli notti had been taken to Scotland as early as the David Rizzio period in the 1560s and had launched several of the tales which he collected three centuries later. It is odd that his opinion of Straparola should hence be so low.

113 ‘Caravaggio,’ in Cremona literata, seu in Cremonensis doctrinis & literariis dignitatibus eminentiores chronologicæ adnotationes (Parma: Pazzoni & Montius, 1702).

114 (Amsterdam: Jean-Frédéric Bernard, 1725).

115 Die Nächte des Strapparola von Caravaggio [sic], 2 vols. (Vienna: Alberti, 1791), with a wordy but unreliable preface attributed to Mazzuchelli, no doubt because of his edition of Bandello published that same year.

116 Die ergötzlichen Nächte reappeared in 1908 in Munich by M. Müller, perhaps the same as that published by him in 1920 as Die Novellen und Mären der Ergötzlichen Nächte, trans. by H. Floerike.

117 The original reads: ‘nicht bloss unanständig, sondern bis zum schamlosen unzüchtig.’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Göttingen: Dieterich’schen Buchhandlung, 1856), vol. III, p. 285.

118 According to Doris Senn, this work also appeared in several other cities in the intervening years, first appearing in 1578, while in her title she gives the dates as 1569–81. She names seven more, bringing the count up to ten and nearly equal to the number of editions in France. ‘Le piacevoli Notti (1550/53) von Giovan Francesco Straparola, ihre italienischen Editionen und die spanische Übersetzung Honesto y agradable Entretenimiento de Damas y Galanes (1569/81) von Francisco Truchado,’ Fabula 34 (1993), p. 49. For a comparative appraisal, see Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Orígenes de la novella, ed. E. Sánchez Reyes, 4 vols. (Santander, 1943), vol. III, pp. 40ff.

119 Shi ye tan [by Shi te la pa luo no], ed. Jian yi Du (Xianggang xiang jiang chu ban gong si, 1986); Pri i atnye nochi (Moscow: Voskhozhdenie, 1993). See also Prii a tnye nochi (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Nauka,’ 1978).

120 W.G. Waters was one of the great Italianists of his age, for in addition to his translations of the novellieri, he was the author of Jerome Cardan: A Biographical Study (1898); Piero della Francesca (1901); The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy (1903); and Italian Sculptors (1911).

121 The first edition of The Pecorone of Ser Giovanni was published in London by Lawrence & Bullen in 1897 in a press run of 110 copies, my own, no. 5, ex libris Glmi:Georg:Waters (his name Italicized on his bookplate).

122 Burton does not seem to have returned to textual ground zero to generate his translation, but rewrites the Waters rendition in a more flamboyant, perhaps orientalized, certainly more aureate style. Why he would do that is not entirely clear, for Waters is already a notch above the more prosaic Straparola and in need of stylistic downsizing. That Burton undertook so enormous a task is, nevertheless, a gesture of commitment to a collection of stories he thought worth the investment. He saw the work as belonging to the same class of literature as the Decameron, the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, and the queen of Navarre’s Heptameron, and found it ‘in no way unworthy of comparison with any of these. Its contents are eminently varied, diverting and (for a work of this genre) original.’ The Most Delectable Nights of Straparola of Caravaggio: The first complete translation into English of Le tredici piacevolissime notti (Paris: Charles Carrington, 1906), p. xxv. His boast of presenting the first complete translation of the work is either a bibliographical fiddle or an out-and-out lie. It is not my intention here to expose him by citing sizeable chunks of word-for-word transcriptions from Waters. Only in the technical sense of citing the edition entitled Le tredici piacevolissime notti is his statement true, and why anyone would want to base an edition on that later and much massacred edition is open to questioning. Anyone interested in these matters can easily follow his trail by having Waters, together with his source, open beside Burton and his proclaimed source, which is any edition appearing after 1569. See the history of the text above.

123 ‘Straparola,’ in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednick (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), vol. 12, pp. 1360–9.

124 The odd edition out is that published in Venice in 1599 by Alessandro de’ Vecchi, ‘con licenza de’ superiori,’ to which enigmas by Giulio Cesare dalla Croce were added, along with illustrations from an anthology by Sansovino issued previously by the same printer.

125 The Moral Philosophy of Doni, ed. Donald Beecher et al. (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2003). This illustrator was partial to foreground-background representations of contrasting episodes, but did not use the side-by-side arrangement with vertical separations.

126 E.E. Hirshler, ‘A French Salon Painting Reconsidered,’ Apollo, no. 121 (June 1985), pp. 413–14.

127 Ian Russell, Images, Representations and Heritage (New York: Springer, 2006), p. 301.

128 Jean-Joseph Keller, ‘Die Lust en der Lust,’ Illustration 29, no. 2 (1992), pp. 54–7.