Bøger af Ruth B. Bottigheimer

Overturns traditional views of the origins of fairy tales and documents their actual origins and transmission.

This book examines magic's generally maleficent effect on humans from ancient Egypt through the Middle Ages, including tales from classical mythology, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures. It shows that certain magical motifs lived on from age to age, but that it took until the Italian Renaissance for magic tales to become fairy tales.

"Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition makes the case that the fairy tale, far from rising from the ground as a rural folk tradition, was invented by a city-bound sixteenth-century Italian literary hack, Zoan Francesco Straparola."-Adam Gopnik, New Yorker