Steinhowel

The first edition of Aesop to be printed in Europe was assembled and published by Heinrich Steinhowel. Steinhowel was born in 1412 and received his education in Vienna and Padova. By 1444 he was a rector magnificus at the University of Heidelberg. In 1476 he published a Latin-German edition of Aesop's fables, and an even more famous version, illustrated with woodcuts, appeared in 1477-1478. Steinhowel died in 1479.

To compare different editions of the woodcut illustrations, you can take a look at this set of three different editions from 1479, 1501 and 1521, side by side at the Aesopica website.

You can find various editions of Steinhowel at GoogleBooks. One very useful edition is by Oesterley: Steinhowels Aesop, published in 1873.

Steinhowel's Aesop contains a version of the Life of Aesop, along with appx. 160 fables. At its core are the medieval prose fables attributed to "Romulus" (sometimes, but not always, going back to the poems of Phaedrus), which constitute about half of the fables in the collection. The "Romulus" fables are supplemented by stories from other authors, including fables attributed to Walter of England, along with some fables newly translated by Rinuccio (Remicius) from Greek sources, as well as the fables of Avianus and some fables from eastern sources drawn from the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alphonsus. Finally, there are some stories taken from the Facetiae of Poggio Bracciolini. By taking this "omnibus" approach, Steinhowel set the stage for other, even more ambitious collections of Aesopic fables that would be published in the 16th and 17th centuries.