Mother Goose is the name given to an archetypical country woman, who is supposedly the originator of the Mother Goose stories and rhymes. Yet no specific writer has ever been identified with such a name, of which the first known mention appears in an aside in a versified chronicle of weekly happenings that appeared regularly for several years, Jean Loret’s “La Muse Historique”, collected in 1650. His remark, …comme un conte de la Mere Oye (“…like a Mother Goose story”) shows that the term was already familiar.
