"Puss in Boots" (German: Der gestiefelte Kater; French: Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté; Italian: Il gatto con gli stivali; Dutch: De Gelaarsde Kat) is a European fairy tale about an anthropomorphic cat who uses trickery and deceit to gain power, wealth, and the hand in marriage of a princess for his penniless and low-born master.

The most popular version of the tale was written in French at the close of the seventeenth century by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), a retired civil servant and member of the Académie française.

[5] Folklorists Joseph Jacobs and Stith Thompson point that the Perrault tale is the possible source of the Cat Helper story in later European folkloric traditions.

[6][7] Similarly, Frisian professor Jurjen van der Kooi noted that variants from oral tradition were only starting to be recorded from the 19th century onwards, and tales from Central and Western Europe follow Perrault's and Grimm's redaction very closely.

[18] According to Swedish scholar Waldemar Liungman [sv], a cycle of tales that developed in Northern Europe involves the spirit of a dead man instead of a cat.

As such, they locate such variants in, besides some tales in France, peninsular Italy, in Sicily, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Finland, Turkey and Mongolia.