SOURCE: Guy Everett Snavely, "Latin Source of deVignay's Fables" in an introduction to The Aesopic Fables in the "Mireoir Historical" of Jehan de Vignay, edited by Guy Everett Snavely, J. H. Furst Company, 1908, pp. 31-36.

In the following excerpt, Snavely discusses how Jehan de Vignay translated Aesop's fables in a fairly literal manner from Latin prose versions into Old French.

While the ultimate source of the short collection of Æsopic Fables contained in Jehan de Vignay's Mireoir Historial is probably to be found in Classical Greek literature,¹ it will be sufficient for the purposes of the present dissertation to investigate our author's immediate source. This latter is readily shown to be the same as that of the remainder of the work; namely, the Speculum Historiale of Vincentius Bellovacensis, which contains the same set of fables in a Latin prose form.

Vincentius Bellovacensis was a Dominican monk who lived...