'Hie Lert uns der meister': Latin Commentary and the German Fable 1350-1500

This study reconceives and rewrites the history of the medieval German fable and is the fullest available on the animal narratives of Aesop and Avian and their reception in the Middle Ages. The author has assembled (and partly discovered) this corpus of more than seventy manuscripts from libraries in some twelve different countries--a major achievement in itself. From this rich collection of medieval fables and their pedagogical prose commentaries, Wright develops new perspectives on a number of larger issues of medieval culture, particularly the character of school life and the development of a learned vernacular literature. These fables and their commentaries served widely as textbooks throughout the Middle Ages, and Wright succeeds in explaining how they were taught in the medieval classroom. He also demonstrates their influence on five German fable collections of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

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