Textual Animals Turned into Narrative Fantasies: The Imaginative Middle Ages

Abstract

This article focuses on the concept 'reconstruction of the world' proposed by G. Zoran in his theoretical work on the representation of space in narrative. It makes special reference to the inter-medially transformative processes that narrators and audiences undergo, as materially concrete objects in space turn into representations in the verbal medium. Investigating the possible bodies of knowledge common to the participants in the communicative process, the article specifically discusses animals widely described in late antique and medieval Jewish folk tales and considers the possibilities for reconstructing the sources of shared imaginary worlds.