Wayfaring Tales and the Religious ImaginationTransformative Textual Encounters in the Medieval Christian East

What can medieval stories tell us about the transformative potential of literature today?

• Offers a new intellectual history of influential medieval narrative traditions
• Discusses comparatively a uniquely expansive chronological, geographical, and linguistic range of texts in Byzantine Greek, Ethiopic, Coptic, Arabic, Georgian, Latin, Sanskrit, Middle Persian, Syriac, and Middle French
• Brings together close philological and textual analysis of medieval texts with capacious critical theorization, drawing on the methods and questions of religious studies, literary theory, and comparative literatures
• Argues for the relevance of the study of medieval texts for contemporary conversations on the relationship between storytelling, religion, and the imagination

This book explores the circulation of tales across premodern Eastern Christian communities, engaging the broader theoretical question of how the migration of stories shapes the religious imagination. What does the migration of tales do to the religious imagination? In asking this question, this book aims to demonstrate the relevance of the history of the circulation of these premodern texts to contemporary conversations in the humanities. The foundation of this exploration comprises well-known literary traditions, such as those of Barlaam and Ioasaph, the Alexander Romance and Kalilah and Dimnah, along with lesser-known ones, like the hagiographical traditions of the Incense Route. Bringing together textual scholarship on these tales and contemporary theoretical work in literary studies, this book demonstrates how the circulation of tales enables the exchange of exogenous cultural resources across communities, thus enacting a generative dissemination of renewing ways to address the ultimate questions of human existence.