Sewing on the frame: Medieval Iberian frametale collections as book-length narratives

This dissertation treats the early Castilian frametale collection between the 13th and 15th centuries and the place of the frametale in literary histories and theories of book-length fictional narrative, including the novel. My goal is to study these frametales as objects, that is in the manuscript and early print formats in which they were produced and have endured, and in historical context, not to establish their histories, but to use their historical specificity to read them as literature at a time when that concept was just taking form. I move from materially grounded analyses of these book objects as late medieval Iberian productions negotiating Latin and Semitic narrative and book-making traditions, to the place of the frametale genre in narrative theory more broadly. Where possible, I have juxtaposed medieval literary concepts of literature and reading to more recent narrative and novel theory, seeking not to fuse the two in a method that would elide the alterity of late medieval fictions, but to show how often both discourses resort to an implicitly codicological understanding of narrative to articulate their projects. I argue that focusing on the frametale within narrative theory enables a productive bridge between narrative theory and histories of the book and reading.;This dissertation investigates the late medieval frametale collection and the individual incunables and manuscripts of Calila e Dimna, Sendebar, and the Conde Lucanor that I discuss from three primary angles: (1) That it represents the textualization of an oral storytelling tradition, and thus is a popular because suitable form for early vernacular prose, and important to consider when studying the emergence of written literature and book-length narrative. (2) That these frametale collections model the shift from wisdom or didactic literature to a concept of fiction that often still uses exemplary rhetoric but complicates it with the pleasures of ambiguous interpretation inherent to heteroglossic or polyvocal forms. (3) That the frametale has long been an important vehicle for translatio studii because it allows for the importing culture to reconfigure the translation on both the macro and micro level to be legible in new contexts and to figure cross-cultural exchange.;I take the title and informing metaphor for this dissertation from hand bookbinding. The sewing frame is a tool, usually wooden, used for aligning a group of signatures---folded groupings of paper---and holding them together tightly against suspended cords so that the binder can stitch the signatures together tightly and uniformly, attaching each signature to the previous one and onto the hanging cords. The hanging bands or cords make it possible to align the individual signatures and attach them neatly and securely. I am using the term to refer metaphorically to the narrative devices that the authors of late medieval frametale collections employed to connect a series of shorter narratives into a longer work. It also refers to my argument that, during the late medieval period, beginning in the thirteenth century and increasingly over the next two centuries, writers of longer-scale fictions begin to conceive of and compose them as "book-length" works, thus building in narrative structures that function like the cords that give the book an increased durability and greatly increase the chances that the materials enclosed within will continue to be bound together.;Whereas the "frame" of the frametale refers to the overarching fiction or narrative frame, by the late medieval period the book itself becomes the frame, a set of spatial expectations that invite certain verbal structures. Like the cords so prominently hung from the sewing frame but later virtually invisible within the book itself, some of the features so common to the frametale become subsumed in the structure of the book; so much so that we have lost sight of them. I am reading for those features of narrative most at home in the book, and asking which of our assumptions about literature, and later the novel, depend on encountering a work in this format.