The current conceptual scaffolding used for describing inter-textual processes often falls short of accounting for important traits in premodern cultural constellations. In place of the alleged or assumed direct sources of influence or explicit trajectories of transmission, we often find that there was no singular “source” text or a “host” culture. Bypassing such familiar but problematic schemes of origins and transmissions and their unresolved questions, the papers in this panel look more closely at the frames, themes, and cross-cultural representations in a variety of premodern texts and pictorial sources to offer a richer, thicker description of themes, motifs, and narrative devices in the formation of cultural transmissions.

To that end, the papers collected in this theme issue of MIZAN explore commonalities and even instances of intertextuality in premodern literature. Olga Davidson revisits the interplay between form and content by focusing on the “master narrative” rather than individual stories that comprise content in a comparative reading of Ferdowsi’s Shahnama and the Arthurian Vulgate. In her telling, the cohesiveness of the narrative in both instances lies within the master narrative itself, the container, rather than what it contains, that is the content.

The same emphasis on the master narrative or the frame story as the principal purveyor of thematic cohesion is the subject of Richard Van Leeuwen’s paper, focused on the cycles of tales in Thousand and One Nights. The cycles, drawn from various narrative sources that originate in varied literary/cultural backgrounds and time periods, were incorporated into the corpus at different stages of its development. But the question of thematic unity in the various stories remains unresolved. According to Van Leeuwen, a comparative framing of the stories yields new insights on the thematic aspects of the narrative.

Gregory Nagy’s paper asks if there is any discernible moral purpose in premodern fables featuring talking humans rather than talking animals? The lens here is on various retellings of the ancient Greek Sybaritic tales juxtaposed with other beast fables from the Aesopic fables, or narratives further afield such as Kalila wa Dimna. Nagy juxtaposes a story known as “Aesop and Bitch” and the story of The Thief and the Innkeeper to explore why it is that the nasty dog who threatens to attack Aesop does not talk.

A fourth and final paper by Amanda Luyster upends the very quest for linear transmission and explicit hybridity by studying the Alhambra ceiling paintings, to suggest that the referent in a straightforward example of “borrowed ware” is not, in fact, testimony to the hybrid culture of Andalusia. Rather than replicating imagery and content from Christian narrative sources in a project patronized by the Nasrid amir, the paintings connect fiction to reality, and reality to fiction by deploying widely recognized protagonists of various romances as vessels for illustrating the chivalry of members of the Order of the Banda.

The current conceptual scaffolding used for describing inter-textual processes often falls short of accounting for important traits in premodern cultural constellations. In place of the alleged or assumed direct sources of influence or explicit trajectories of transmission, we often find that there was no singular “source” text or a “host” culture. Bypassing such familiar but problematic schemes of origins and transmissions and their unresolved questions, the papers in this panel look more closely at the frames, themes, and cross-cultural representations in a variety of premodern texts and pictorial sources to offer a richer, thicker description of themes, motifs, and narrative devices in the formation of cultural transmissions.

To that end, the papers collected in this theme issue of MIZAN explore commonalities and even instances of intertextuality in premodern literature. Olga Davidson revisits the interplay between form and content by focusing on the “master narrative” rather than individual stories that comprise content in a comparative reading of Ferdowsi’s Shahnama and the Arthurian Vulgate. In her telling, the cohesiveness of the narrative in both instances lies within the master narrative itself, the container, rather than what it contains, that is the content.

The same emphasis on the master narrative or the frame story as the principal purveyor of thematic cohesion is the subject of Richard Van Leeuwen’s paper, focused on the cycles of tales in Thousand and One Nights. The cycles, drawn from various narrative sources that originate in varied literary/cultural backgrounds and time periods, were incorporated into the corpus at different stages of its development. But the question of thematic unity in the various stories remains unresolved. According to Van Leeuwen, a comparative framing of the stories yields new insights on the thematic aspects of the narrative.

Gregory Nagy’s paper asks if there is any discernible moral purpose in premodern fables featuring talking humans rather than talking animals? The lens here is on various retellings of the ancient Greek Sybaritic tales juxtaposed with other beast fables from the Aesopic fables, or narratives further afield such as Kalila wa Dimna. Nagy juxtaposes a story known as “Aesop and Bitch” and the story of The Thief and the Innkeeper to explore why it is that the nasty dog who threatens to attack Aesop does not talk.

A fourth and final paper by Amanda Luyster upends the very quest for linear transmission and explicit hybridity by studying the Alhambra ceiling paintings, to suggest that the referent in a straightforward example of “borrowed ware” is not, in fact, testimony to the hybrid culture of Andalusia. Rather than replicating imagery and content from Christian narrative sources in a project patronized by the Nasrid amir, the paintings connect fiction to reality, and reality to fiction by deploying widely recognized protagonists of various romances as vessels for illustrating the chivalry of members of the Order of the Banda.