Sources of Fantasy - Renaissance

Renaissance

During the Renaissance, Giovanni Francesco Straparola wrote and published The Facetious Nights of Straparola, a collection of stories, many of which are literary fairy tales Giambattista Basile wrote and published the Pentamerone, a collection of literary fairy tales, the first collection of stories to contain solely the stories later to be known as fairy tales. Both of these works includes the oldest recorded form of many well-known (and more obscure) European fairy tales. This was the beginning of a tradition that would both influence the fantasy genre and be incorporated in it, as many works of fairytale fantasy appear to this day.

Although witchcraft and wizardry were both believed to be actual at the time, such motifs as the fairies in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Weird Sisters in Macbeth and Prospero in The Tempest (or Doctor Faustus in Christopher Marlowe's play) would be deeply influential on later works of fantasy.

In a work on alchemy in the 16th century, Paracelsus identified four types of beings with the four elements of alchemy: gnomes, earth elementals; undines, water elementals; sylphs, air elementals; and salamanders, fire elementals. Most of these beings are found in folklore as well as alchemy; their names are often used interchangeably with similar beings from folklore. However, as elementals, they are often used in fantasy works as personifications of the forces of nature.