SOURCE: "Introduction," in Aesop's Fables with a Life of Aesop, translated and edited by John E. Keller and L. Clark Keating, pp. 1-6. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993.

In the following essay, Keller and Keating trace the history of Aesopic fables in Spain until the fifteenth-century publication of the Spanish Ysopet.

Aesop's Fables, with a Life of Aesop—in Spanish La vida del Ysopet con sus fabulas hystoriadas—along with versions with similar titles in many western languages, represents the apogee of that body of stories we know as Aesop's Fables. This may seem an unusual statement to make, since the Ysopet, as we shall term it in this introduction, was not translated into Castilian until the late fifteenth century and not printed in its entirety in Spain until 1489. An incomplete version was printed in Saragossa in 1482 with woodcuts colored by hand. According to Victoria Burrus, who pointed...