Thomas Frederick Crane

Thomas Frederick Crane (1844–1927) was an American scholar of medieval and Romance literature and one of the founders of American folklore studies. A graduate of Princeton who practiced law in Ithaca, he joined the new Cornell University in 1868 and taught there for forty years, serving as dean and twice as acting president. Italian Popular Tales (1885), the first substantial collection of Italian folk stories in English, was followed by editions of medieval exempla, including The Exempla of Jacques de Vitry (1890), and studies of Italian social customs of the sixteenth century. He was a founder of the American Folklore Society and helped establish folklore as a university subject.