The seven facetiae by Poggio Bracciolini, or Poggio the Florentine, are a peculiar presence in the vernacular versions of the fables of Aesop, which began with the compilation assembled by Heinrich Steinhöwel and translated by him into German. This very successful collection was published c. 1476 in Ulm and was subsequently translated and published in French, English (from the French, by William Caxton), Dutch, Low-German, and Czech. Steinhöwel's compilation was expressly intended to be instructive and moralizing, and the wisdom expressed in the Aesopian fables offered ample material for this purpose, but the facetiae are not moralizing or edifying at all. Poggio purported to record his collection of jokes and anecdotes for demonstrating that Latin was flexible enough to be written as a living language. He made a point of explaining that his facetiae were stories (and ‘lies’) swapped by the apostolic secretaries in the antechambers of the papal Curia, and it adds to their comedic effect to imagine the anecdotes emanating from the mouths of these highly educated, well-travelled, worldly wise men, presumably delivered dead-pan and with appropriate accents. For unlike the mostly animal population of the fables of Aesop and his followers, Poggio's stories are about humans in all walks of life, and living in many parts of the western world, speaking different languages, their words all rendered in Latin.