The now-forgotten book Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of the Tales, 1634-1636), a collection of fairy tale-like stories by Giambattista Basile, served as the basis for several of our culture’s best-known fairy tales, including Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel, and Hanzel and Gretel. Charles Perrault in particular used Basile’s tales as the basis for his famous versions. The kicker is that the original Basile versions were racy and violent, so Perrault and others have bequeathed bowdlerized, sanitized versions to the world.

In Fairy Tales: A New History, Ruth B. Bottigheimer explains:

Basile’s cinder-heroine is a world away [from Perrault's heroine]. Her name, also the story’s title, “The Cinderella Cat” (La Gatta Cenerentola), prepares us for the hiss and scratch that follow: The widowed father of Basile’s Cinderella took a perfect harridan as his second wife, a woman who made our heroine’s life such a misery that little Cinderella Cat complained to her governess. Seeing opportunity, the governess told Cinderella to slam a trunk lid onto her stepmother’s neck to be quit of her for good and all, and then to beg her father to take her (the governess) as his new wife, promising that she would then give Cinderella the best of everything. And thus it happened. It was as a murderess that Basile’s Cinderella Cat began her ascent to the throne.

Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty” is nearly as much a part of contemporary narrative culture as is “Cinderella.” The source of his tale was a passing king who had sex with her, with the result that - nine months later and still-sleeping - she gave birth to twins. Only when one of her babies mistakenly sucked on her fingertip and pulled out the sleep-causing splinter did she awaken, amazed at the infant companions she found beside her on the bed. The tale played out with the king’s continued bigamy, an attempted murder, and a comic striptease, after which the bigamous king set everything right. Basile had not invented this tale, but he maintained the essential elements and the spirit of a much longer and far bawdier version - already a few centuries old when Basile took it up - in his reworking.