Ruth B. Bottigheimer

Fairy Godfather, Fairy-Tale History, and Fairy-Tale Scholarship: A Response to Dan Ben-Amos, Jan M. Ziolkowski, and Francisco Vaz da Silva

This article is a response to criticisms of my thesis that Giovanni Francesco Straparola invented the rise fairy-tale plotline in 1550s Venice. In order to clarify and support the argument that I made in my 2002 book, Fairy Godfather, I here make efforts toward establishing a common terminology, critiquing the parameters of Proppian structural analysis, and revising the trope of women-as-storytellers. I affirm the importance of sociohistorical studies of publishing, editing, and patterns of literacy for understanding the emergence and spread of rise fairy tales. I refute arguments for the existence of rise fairy tales in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages. In addition, I offer further explanations of how print technology, widespread schooling, and economic change brought about the emergence of rise fairy tales in Renaissance Venice, and to account for the post-1789 spread of rise fairy tales among European and non-European populations, I cite increasing literacy in rural areas.

Hanna Dyâb’s Witch and the Great Witch Shift

Hanna Dyâb’s characterisation of a witch figure as a magicienne in his 1709 story ‘Prince Ahmed and Pari Banou’ typifies early modern depictions of evil females in magic tales. Institutional censorship, individual awareness of accusations of witchcraft and authorial writing practices all contribute to the various ways of depicting wicked women as something other than witches. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s editing of Kinder- und Hausmarchen (1807–1857) witchified evil women in the collection’s best known tales; their collection’s powerful influence on genre expectations about fairy tales displaced earlier visions of evil in fairy tales and created an assumption that witches were integral to traditional fairy tales.

The Evolution of Fairy Tale Magic from Straparola to Basile and Perrault

Within the magic in Giovan Francesco Straparola’s tales in the Pleasant Nights, it is principally satanic black magic as practiced in “Ortodosio and Isabella” (VII.1) and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (VIII.5) that conflicted with canon law. The sorceress Gabriela in “Ortodosio and Isabella,” whose historical namesake was condemned by church authorities and executed 200 years earlier, demonstrates this clearly. But neither church nor state had a position on Straparola’s fairy tale magic.

Jewish Magic Tales

This chapter’s explorations of Jewish magic tales rest on Hebrew manuscript books that are traceable to specific geographic locations or particular historical eras, and sometimes to both. Biblical histories from the Torah, the first five books of the canonical Bible, underlay centuries of Jewish tellings of magic tales and also provided plot outlines or characters for later expansions of those tales. A close consideration of Moses’ supernaturally powerful exploits as they exist in the Torah opens the chapter, and is followed by an examination of magic tales from the Babylonian exile, the period of revolts against Roman authority, and ancient and medieval diasporic narratives.

Tales, Magic, and Fairy Tales

This book focuses on the narrative aspects of magic in magic tales from ancient Egypt to the Renaissance and the early modern period in Europe. In these tales magic often operates from a parallel world and affirms existing earthly and supernatural hierarchies. In the process, both magic and supernatural beings frequently pose dangers to ordinary mortals in the tales. An important component of this study is its interest in what characters in magic tales perceive to be magic and what they accept as normal manifestations, even when they appear uncanny to modern eyes. The variations in magic tale characters’ perception and experience of magic suggests a new and different prehistory for fairy tales.

Egyptian, Greek, and Roman Magic Tales

One of the world’s most ancient recorded stories tells of a sailor shipwrecked on a distant island. Just as he gives thanks for his deliverance, a monstrously large, gold-skinned serpent with blue eyebrows approaches. The serpent asks who brought him to these shores, which the sailor, prostrating himself, answers by telling of the wreck and his survival. In a sympathetic response, the serpent recounts his own sad history and promises the sailor rich gifts, a prosperous future, and death and burial in his homeland (Lichtheim, 1973: 1: 211–15; Simpson, 1972: 50–61).

Magic Tales in the Muslim Middle Ages

In contrast to the two previous chapters, only two medieval manuscript texts inform the greater part of this chapter.1 One, Tales of the Marvellous (Al-hikayat al-’ajiba) contains 18 stories of its original 42; the other, Alf Layla wa-Layla (Thousand and One Nights), consists of the frametale, five narrative cycles, three novellas and the opening pages of a fourth from the earliest substantially surviving manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights, as it is popularly known. It might be objected that the narratives in these two collections are not “tales” per se. That objection is valid for Tales of the Marvellous, some of whose stories are longer than the half hour or so that I accord a “tale’s” telling, but in Alf Layla wa-Layla, Dinarzad routinely denotes each of Shahrazad’s partial tellings of a lengthy narrative as “what has been said,” the Arabic phrase rendered in English as “story” or “tale.” (See “terminology” in Chapter 1, p. 4.) In this light, it is justifiable to redefine a lengthy narrative like “The Two Viziers” as a composite that consists of a series of brief tellings that cumulatively comprise the narrative as a whole.

The Problematics of Magic on the Threshold of Fairy Tale Magic: Straparola’s Early Modern Pleasant Nights

Giovan Francesco Straparola’s Piacevoli Notti (The Pleasant Nights) holds surprises when it comes to magic. The kinds of magic that Straparola introduced into his 1550s tale collection, the ways in which he did so, and his apparent attitudes toward magic are unanticipated, as is the disjunction between Straparola’s magic and that documented in studies of contemporary popular magic.1

Magic at Court and on the Piazza

As the three previous chapters show, oral performances in the medieval period were infinite in their variety. Some were spontaneous, the outbursts of court jesters or village fools, or the witticisms of clever individuals. Others were prepared. The preacher had studied the sermon tale he told to small or medium-sized crowds outdoors or to larger audiences in church; the minstrel had closely read the courtly epic that he sang or chanted for a courtly household and its servants, and he might check it against a prompt sheet in the course of his performance if he needed reminders. Coarse and bawdy fabliaux might be told with snickers and winks to guffawing listeners of either high or low status, or both together. All of these performance occasions were court-, church-, or household-related, that is, they took place among people who gathered together because they governed or served at court, or were addressed by the church and its functionaries, or were sharing the same roof, either briefly or for the long term. Among all of the storytelling venues that existed in the medieval period, court, church, and household venues predominated into the high Middle Ages, that is, until around 1250–1300.

Magic Tales in Medieval Christian Europe

A vast variety of stories circulated in the Christian Middle Ages. Their differing casts of characters reflected Europe’s mix of Celtic, Germanic, Latin, and Slavic ethnic groups and its pagan and Christian religious cultures. Story plots communicate peasant, mercantile, courtly, and cloistered social environments, as well as rural and urban communities, narrative riches that were further expanded by importations from Byzantium, and from West, East, and South Asian cultures. There were stories for every taste: bawdy tales of lust and low humor, chaste allegories of hot desire thwarted and heavenly reward conferred. Miraculous intervention saved sinners and routed the devil; chivalric epics eased slow hours at court; and prankish urban tales and abbreviated romances of knightly valor amused literate city dwellers along with less lettered contemporaries, at home and on the road.