Barlaam and Josaphat in Europ. Med. Literature

The project will focus on one of the most popular legends of the Middle Ages: the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, a christianised version of the life of Buddha, which engendered an incredibly broad reception from the 12th century onward, both in the East and West. A short introduction gives a summary on the history of the study of legends: science of religion, history, literary studies and recent interdisciplinary approaches illustrate the way scholars have been dealing with this topic since the 19th century. A special focus will be given to the question of genre or subgenre "legend romance" within the current scholarly discussion. A second part of the project centers on the reception of the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat: We will present and discuss European Barlaam texts dating from the 13th to the 15th century. This overall view will be accompanied by a research review. The text corpus includes texts from Spain, Portugal, France, England, Italy, Scandinavia, and Germany. A selection of "legend romances" from Germany, Spain, and France is the basis to a more profound analysis in the third part of the project. The main focus of these interpretations will be (1) the making of a saint and (2) the functionalisation of a legend. For this part the corpus will include only works derived from the Latin Vulgate version.

The Legend of Barlaam and Josaphat is one of the very few narratives with a successful history on more than just one continent. It is based on the Buddha-legend, that survived until the Latin Middle Ages over pre-Christian (Arabic), Georgian, and Greek intermediate stages of transmission. The text was translated into different vernaculars based on this Latin text and was continually present throughout the whole Middle Ages. The project took French, German, English and Italian versions into account as well as versions from the Iberian peninsular and Scandinavia that trace more or less directly back to the Latin versions. Therefore this is the first overview on the vernacular tradition that traces back to the Latin versions (medieval versions not based on this tradition were not analyzed in detail). Not only a broad linguistic variety but also a variety of genre can be noticed: the texts range from more or less short texts within bigger collections of legends over large sized texts in the style of courtly novels to medieval plays. Besides articles in journals the project produces two publications in which the fundamental results of the project are summarized: 1. A monograph. This book written by project team member Dr. Constanza Cordoni will be published in Akademie-Verlag, Berlin. Part I first shows the development of the Barlaam and Josaphat-tale from the Indian roots to the Latin Vulgate-version and deals in a next step with a broad overview on the western European Barlaam-tradition organized in chapters by language. This account of the European transmission also contains a research overview and a commented bibliography. Part II Studies on the vernacular versions of the Barlaam-legend encompasses comparative individual studies on key questions of poetics (but also on implications for cultural analysis) based on the old-French version of Gui de Cambrai, the Middle High-German version of Rudolf von Ems, and the anonymous Castilian prose-version Libro de Berlan. Part III of the book gives a summary of the Vulgate organized in chapters, an index of the Barlaam-versions, an index of the manuscript-tradition, a list of metadiegetic texts of pre-Barlaam-versions and the Vulgate, and an overview on the (broad) individual reception of the apologues. All of that makes this monograph a fundamental work for later research on the text. 2. A miscellany that will publish the results of an international conference as well as a yet unedited Latin version of the legend. Because of its events this project was able to give new impulses to the international Barlaam-research; several book-projects developed due to our conference and other scholarly encounters.