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Marion Uhlig and Yasmina Foehr-Janssens, eds., D’Orient en Occident: Les recueils de fables enchâssées avant les “Mille et une nuits” de Galland (“Barlaam et Josaphat,” “Calila et Dimna,” “Disciplina clericalis,” “Roman des Sept Sages”) . (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 16.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Pp. xi, 492; 2 color plates, 20 black-and-white illustrations, and 3 tables. €110. ISBN: 978-2-503-54687-2.Table of contents available online at http://www.brepols.…

2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/689602

2040-8072

Sharon Kinoshita,

Biblical Studies and Interpretation

Previous articleNext article FreeReviewsMarion Uhlig and Yasmina Foehr-Janssens, eds., D’Orient en Occident: Les recueils de fables enchâssées avant les “Mille et une nuits” de Galland (“Barlaam et Josaphat,” “Calila et Dimna,” “Disciplina clericalis,” “Roman des Sept Sages”). (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 16.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Pp. xi, 492; 2 color plates, 20 black-and-white illustrations, and 3 tables. €110. ISBN: 978-2-503-54687-2.Table of contents available online at http://www.brepols.net/ Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503546872-1 (accessed 3 June 2016)Sharon KinoshitaSharon KinoshitaUniversity of California, Santa Cruz Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreEastern frame-tale collections, Hans Runte’s foreword reminds us, were among the most read and widely transmitted of medieval texts, the “rich supra-national literary patrimony” (1) behind the Decameron, Canterbury Tales, and many later examples. These twenty-one essays from a 2010 colloquium explore “unexpected networks of convergence” across the linguistic, geographic, temporal, generic, and ideological divides that typically consign studies of the four texts named in the title to separate fields of research. The book is divided thematically into five sections: “Transmission from East to West”, “Frame Tale Collections: A Western Tradition,” “Fables and their Metamorphoses,” “Manuscripts and Embeddings,” and “Reception in Early Modernity” (which will not be discussed here). Barry Taylor’s essay gives a useful if schematic overview of frame tales in medieval Iberia: Arabic maqama and Hebrew mahberet traditions; Castilian texts such as El Conde Lucanor and the Libro de Buen Amor. For ease of reference, I group the remaining entries by primary text.Barlaam and Josaphat. Charles Genequand (in French) overturns the dominant understanding of the Arabic Bilawhar and Būdāsaf as the Islamicization of a Buddhist legend, subsequently Christianized in its Georgian translation. A similar pre-Islamic conversion story in the tenth-century compilation Kitāb al-Agānī suggests a syncretism of pre-Islamic Christian elements with the Islamic asceticism (zuhd) and ascetic poetry (zahdiyya) that emerged in the eighth century in reaction against Umayyad court luxury. Such Christian elements were excised from or modified in the Bilawhar, which Genequand redates to the tenth century. Joseph Sadan (in French) taxonomizes Hebrew frame-tale texts into five categories ranging from simple translation (Syntipas, the Hebrew Sindbād) to adaptations that pass as originals (Mechal ha-qadmoni). He traces networks of possible sources (particularly the Arabic adab tradition) of Abraham Ben Hisday’s thirteenth-century Hebrew translation/adaptation of the Arabic BJ, focusing on themes of the mistrust of royalty and the embedded tale of the dead’s advice to the living. Elsa Legittimo compares the BJ tale of a man fallen into a well with its analogue in the Mūlasarvāstivāda-Vinayavastu. Victoria Smirnova (in French) analyzes the reuse of fables from the Latin BJ in homiletic literature (Jacques de Vitry, Jean Gobi), noting the most/least popular fables; the preservation (or not) of links to BJ or its supposed author, John of Damascus; sections of the frame story most likely to be transmitted; how fables or their morals are modified. An eight-page table summarizes her findings. Carlos Alvar’s essay (in Spanish) compares the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Provençal, Portuguese, and Castilian versions, then tracks variations of one exemplum, “The Hunter and the Nightingale,” across several traditions. Costanza Cordoni (in German) considers two Arabic texts, including Bilawhar and Būdāsaf, as background to father-son relations in vernacular BJs in German (by Rudolf von Ems), French (Gui de Cambrai), and Castilian. Marion Uhlig (in French) discusses Gui de Cambrai’s early thirteenth-century Old French verse translation, focusing on innovations in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France MS fr. 1553 (see also Foehr-Janssen’s article on the Sept Sages): notably, a long Christian-pagan disputation placed at the very center of the text, where the Christian side is represented by a false Barlaam who ends up convinced by his own arguments.Calila et Dimna. Aboubakr Chraïbi’s essay (in French) unpacks the structural complexity of the oldest Arabic version of Kalila wa-Dimna—“a foundational book of Arabic literature” (42)—focusing on the third of the text’s three introductions in relation to the Disciplina clericalis. Nancy Freeman Regalado (in French) analyzes Raymond de Béziers’ Latin version of CD in the presentation copy Paris BNF lat. 8504 (1313). Additions doubling the length of the Castilian original emphasize maxims from medieval school texts like the Distichs of Cato or Romulus, underscoring the text’s pedagogical orientation as a mirror for princes. Added verses are, unusually, written in red ink and highlighted by other aspects of mise-en-page. Hugo Bizzarri (in French) describes illustrations of version A of the Castilian CD (translated mid-thirteenth century) in the late-fourteenth/early fifteenth-century manuscript, El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, MS h.III.9. The images are no-frills, “syncretic” in combining more than one scene in a single frame, formulaic in the rendition of animals, and often privileging scenes of dialogue.Disciplina clericalis (DC). Amy Heneveld examines the transformation of the meaning of two tales, “L’homme et le serpent” and the “Lai de l’oiselet,” in their transmission from the father-son pedagogy of the DC to the lovers’ debate in the thirteenth-century French Donnei des amants.The Seven Sages of Rome (SSR). Karla Mallette traces webs of connections between the SSR tale of “Medicus” and other tale traditions (Secundus the Silent Philosopher, The Thousand and One Nights, Bosone da Gubbio’s L’avventuroso ciciliano), highlighting questions of silence (of the characters; of missing links in the chain of textual transmission) and the book that kills. The other three essays treat the Old French SSR (in the so-called K version). Examining the text’s double prologue, Madeleine Jeay (in French) suggests that the alternation between the voice of the cleric and the minstrel echoes the dialogical principle underlying the frame tale itself, showing the limitations of didacticism and the necessity for ongoing exegesis. Focusing on “Senescalus” (one of four tales common to eastern and western RSS traditions), Mary Speer argues that the switch from a male to a female narrator and the interplay of narrative levels produce a “complex web of conflicting exemplarities” (204) that muddles the tale’s gendered moral. Yasmina Foehr-Janssen examines the thirty-one texts of sapiential literature comprising part one of BNF MS fr. 1553 (dated 1285). Four (including the RSS K version) feature complex variations of a “Vengance de notre Seigneur” that thematize the interrelation between “Rome” (antiquity) and “Jerusalem” (Christianity) as a privileged site of conversion—accompanied, in the RSS, with the suppression of the text’s eastern origins.This volume does an excellent job calling attention to the importance of the cultural work performed by these understudied texts, individually and collectively, from the high Middle Ages through early modernity. While several of the articles are primarily descriptive, those by Genequand, Sadan, Uhlig, Regalado, and Foehr-Janssen are noteworthy for their analytical, conceptual, or interpretive contributions. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 92, Number 1January 2017 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689602 Copyright 2017 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.