John Colin Dunlop  

With this view, Rabelais availed himself of the writings of those who had preceded him in satirical romance, and imitated in particular the True History of Lucian. His stories he borrowed chiefly from previous facetiae and novellettes: Thus the story of Hans Carvel's ring, of which Fontaine believed him the inventor, is one of the Facetiae of Poggio Bracciolini, and entitled Annulus, or Visio Francesci Philelphi. With an intention of adding to the diversion of the reader, he has given a mixture of burlesque and barbarous words from the Greek and Latin, a notion which was perhaps suggested by the Liber Macaronicorum of Teofilo Folengi, published under name of MerUnus Coccaius, about twenty years before the appearance of the work of Rabelais. An infinite number of puns and quibbles have also been introduced amongst the more ingenious conceptions of the author. In short, his romance may be considered as a mixture, or olio, of all the merry, satirical, and comic modes of writing that had been employed previous to the age in which he wrote."--History of Fiction (1814) by John Colin Dunlop

"Straparola deals abundantly in the snpernatura]. The old folk tale of the young man who wooed and won the King of Poland's daughter by his power to transform himself into an eagle, a wolf, and an ant, ia given with scarcely any artificial modifications, whereas Ser GioTanni two centuries before was careful to exclude the fabulous from his tales. Straparola's tales were very popular in France, where many imitations of them appeared. The book underwent, according to Brahelmann, twenty -eight editions. The work, which is one of the most indecent of its kind, was prohibited bv the Church in 1605, notwithstanding which, however, it was reprinted at Venice in 1608.— Landau, Beitraege, p. 130."--History of Fiction (1814) by John Colin Dunlop