Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 63-10, Section: A, page: 3547.

Director: Maria Rosa Menocal.

In Spain, science, history and law began to be written in Romance in the 13th century. At this time, and corresponding to a new interest in the dissemination of the medieval sciences, a need arose to transmit a way of understanding man and creation that integrated practical wisdom and questions of the spirit. As this knowledge concerned the most vital and intimate aspects of the human being, the most appropriate vehicle for its transmission was the language in which readers communicated in everyday life. In Spain, literary fiction written in the vernacular emerged, in the 13 th century, as a means of teaching this knowledge.

Spain had produced several collections of didactic pieces during the 12th century. These were used in religious sermons, and weren't planned as works of literature. In the second half of the 13th century, the first structured books of prose fiction in the vernacular, Calila e Dimna (1251) and Sendebar (1253), appeared in Castile. These translations of Arabic collections of framed stories taught how to behave and how to attain transcendence, and they showed, in their technique of framing stories within longer and greater tales, a new way in which stories could be written and remembered, and in which the educational force and the beauty of narrative could be enhanced.

The frame (a dialogue, a prologue, or the story of a life) of the medieval collection of teaching stories shows us the formation of the writer of fictional prose. This writer is at the same time a literary character, an apprentice of ethics and aesthetics, and a narrator able to talk about himself. The 13 th century artificer will later be present in the authorial figures of don Juan Manuel, the Arcipreste de Hita and Miguel de Cervantes.

This dissertation focuses on Calila e Dimna, Sendebar, and the Catalan Libre de meravelles (1289) of Ramon Llull. In these texts, in which animals (and even plants and minerals) can talk about man and teach him, the whole of creation becomes meaningful in correspondence with the medieval conception of the human being as microcosm. Through its use in these texts, the vernacular points, thus, the way to a reflection on the possibility of a "universal language".