Between Text and Image: The 16th-Century Editions of an Eclectic Fable Collection – La vie et fables d’Esope Phrygien, 1547

The fable collection entitled La vie et fables d’Esope Phrygien, traduites de nouveau en français selon la verité grecque was published anonymously in 1547 by the Parisian printer Denis Janot. This real best-seller of Aesopic literature in prose constitutes a synthesis of tradition and innovation in terms of both the choice of sources, and the mise en page. In fact the engravings, the dispositio and the typographical choices prove that the Anonyme de 1547 remains in balance between the will to continue a tradi- tion inherited from the incunabula era, and the ambition to renew the French Aesopic fable in prose thanks to a more airy layout enhancing the aesthetic function of engrav- ings, a mise en page clearly distinguishing the moralizing sentence from the narrative as in humanist fable collections, and the use of roman fonts helping to present it as a work worthy of competing with scholarly translations of classical texts. Moreover, each of the series of images that adorn the text contributes in a different way to the production of the meaning of the apologue. The evaluation of coherence between the didactic and graphic components of our fablier allows assumptions to be made about its connections with Corrozet’s collection, published three years later.