Directorium humanae vitae

…12th century, John of Capua’s Directorium humanae vitae (“Guide for Human Life”), one of the most celebrated repositories of moralistic tales (exempla) used by Christian preachers, was developed from this Hebrew translation. So too the famous Senbād-nāmeh (“Fables of Sinbad”)—one of the sources, incidentally, of Boccaccio’s Decameron—was rendered from Arabic…

This, the Directorium humanae vitae (“Guide for Human Life”), was the chief means by which Oriental fables became current in Europe. In The Fables of Bidpai, animals act as men in animal form, and little attention is paid to their supposed animal characteristics. It is in this…