ABSTRACT
Cinderella can fairly be claimed as the best known of fairytales in modern times, as well as the first tale to be subjected to attempts at the ‘exhaustive’ collecting of its variants. It was long assumed that the story, or rather group of stories, did not date much further back than the early seventeenth century, when a recognisable form of it appeared as Basile’s La Gatta Cenerentola.1
