Publisher's Synopsis
From the 'Thousand and One Nights' to the 'Canterbury Tales', from the 'Panchatantra' to the 'Decameron', a vast network of texts highlight the richness and orginality 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.
