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)

From the
Thousand and One Nights to the
Canterbury Tales, from the
Panchatantra to the
Decameron, passing by
Artamène or Cyrus Grand, a vast network of texts highlight the richness and originality of the narrative device of embedding (or 'stories within a story') inherited from the Eastern tradition. The impressive number of narratives deploying this structure, as well as the extraordinary diffusion that they have known in the East as in the West, throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern period, illustrate the urgent need to rethink the study of these texts, many of which are among the most famous landmarks of universal literature.
The studies gathered here focus on four of these tale collections: the Calila and Dimna (or Panchatantra), the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, the Seven Sages (or Book of Sindibad), and the Disciplina clericalis by Peter Alphonsi. The first three narratives had shaped the entire history of Eastern literature well before their arrival in the West. The fourth is one of the most important collections we have inherited from the Middle Ages, as evidenced by its dissemination from the Roman de Renart to Boccaccio's Decameron .
These story-collections drawn from the narrative traditions of the Levant begin to arrive in medieval Europe in the twelfth century. In the West, their influence is felt right up until the modern period through rewritings and adaptations. By bringing together the work of more than twenty specialists in the various literatures that illustrate this tradition, this volume intends to follow the course of the four texts of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages to the dawn of the Enlightenment.