Pleasant Nights

In Giovan Francesco Straparola's The Pleasant Nights, a group of men and women gathertogether in a villa on the Venetian island of Murano during Carnival to sing songs, tell tales,and solve riddles. Asixteenth-century bestseller, The Pleasant Nights is today a fundamentaltext for European folk and fairy tale studies, for alongside triumphal and tragic love stories,comical tales of practical jokes, andaccounts of witty retorts, Straparola (1480? - 1557?)placed some of the first fairy tales printed in Europe. Straparola's eloquent female narratorsand the fairy tales they recount became a model for ageneration of French women writersin Parisian salons, who used the fairy tale to interrogate the gender norms of their day. Thisbook presents the first new and complete English translation ofStraparola's tales and riddlesto be published since the nineteenth century.