Carolina Cupane & Bettina Krönung (eds.), Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond, Leiden: Brill
2016
Contents |
This volume offers an overview of the rich narrative
material circulating in the medieval Mediterranean. As a multilingual and
multicultural zone, the Eastern Mediterranean offered a broad market for tales
in both oral and written form and longer works of fiction, which were
translated and reworked in order to meet the tastes and cultural expectations
of new audiences, thus becoming common intellectual property of all the peoples
around the Mediterranean shores. Among others, the volume examines for the first
time popular eastern tales, such as Kalila and Dimna, Sindbad, Barlaam and
Joasaph, and Arabic epics together with their Byzantine adaptations. Original
Byzantine love romances, both learned and vernacular, are discussed together
with their Persian counterparts and with later adaptations of western stories.
This combination of such disparate narrative material aims to highlight both
the wealth of medieval storytelling and the fundamental unity of the medieval
Mediterranean world.
Contributors are Carolina Cupane, Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, Massimo Fusillo, Corinne Jouanno, Grammatiki A. Karla, Bettina Krönung, Renata Lavagnini, Ulrich Moennig, Ingela Nilsson, Claudia Ott, Oliver Overwien, Panagiotis Roilos, Julia Rubanovich, Ida Toth, Robert Volk, and Kostas Yiavis.