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Peter
Speed, ed.
Medieval Cautionary
Tales: An Anthology.
New York, Italica Press.
218pp.
Paperback.
ISBN 0934977283.
Publisher's
recommended price $15.00
For the first time in a
convenient English anthology, Peter Speed assembles seventy-nine
representative tales of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, together
with useful and well-informed introductions to genres and traditions.
Part I surveys the Spanish tradition. The "Oriental anthologies"
include Calila and Dimna and Sendebar - Spanish versions of the frame
stories of India, Persia, and the Arab world popularized in A Thousand and One Nights. The
medieval exempla include The Book of
Cats, The Book of Exempla
A.B.C., the Mirror of the
Laity, Juan Ruiz's Libro de
Buen Amor, plus such later anthologies as The Seven Sages of Rome and the Life and Fables of Aesop.
Part II offers a representative selection of sixteen French fabliaux,
ranging from the sexual warfare of such well-known stories as The Goodwife of Orleans to the wily
folk wisdom of The Peasant Who
Argued His Way into Paradise.
Part III presents English stories that set the stage for Elizabethan
comedy, including a sampling of humorous ballads from the later Middle
Ages, and a selection from A Hundred
Mery Talys, a sixteenth-century joke book.
Speed edits these tales with all the rough edges, ribald humor, and
unapologetic earthiness of their time and place. Here the reader will
discover stories that recall Aesop, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare and
Molière, as vixen and wolf, monk and priest, merchant and
shopkeeper, lord of the manor and courtly lady, all wage sexual and
social, moral, religious and economic battles of wit, chicanery, and -
sometimes - loyalty and faith.
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