Edward Wheatley. Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Pp. x + 278. $55.

For two hundred years, the history and reception of the Latin fable in the Middle Ages has been almost exclusively the province of continental scholars, while English- language work in the field has lagged badly behind in both its sophistication and its intensity. With the present volume, Edward Wheatley takes a major step toward redressing that imbalance. This imaginative and enlightening study, the wittily titled revision and expansion of the author's 1991 University of Virginia dissertation, is certain to become a standard work in the field, widely read not only by historians of the fable but by anyone with an interest in the contributions of elementary Latin education to the formation of vernacular cultures in the late Middle Ages.

A. E. Wright
Fordham University