ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the circumstances in which G. F. Straparola and G. Basile’s collections were created, as well as the distinguishing features of the new genre. Fairy tales made their European debut in early modern Italy, both authored texts and oral folk narratives had long incorporated fairy-tale material. One genre related to fairy tales, the moralizing Aesopian beast fable, saw its culmination in Italy in Giacomo Morlini’s Latin Novellae. By the mid-sixteenth century, folkloric and popular motifs and techniques were present in multiple storytelling contexts, including the elite conversational circles of academies and literary salons. There are no known written sources for Straparola’s fairy tales, and notwithstanding the “centuries-long pattern of literary borrowing from story traditions of the ‘folk’,” this may be the first “hard evidence of their existence in the oral culture of the Renaissance”. Straparola is firmly entrenched in the novella tradition, and in his fairy tales realistic and fantastic elements uniquely merge.
