New Books in Islamic Studies, a podcast on the New Books Network,  has released a conversation with Professors Isabel Toral and Beatrice Gruendler, hosted by Samuel Thrope, about their edited volume An Unruly Classic: Kalīla and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions (Brill, 2024). They discuss, from multiple perspectives, a core aspect of their work on this textual tradition: the study of variation and mutability. The conversation aims to shed light on Kalila and Dimna’s so-called mouvance and to establish typologies of textual mobility and instability across linguistic traditions and historical periods, while presenting analytical tools to describe, classify, represent, and interpret these dynamics. It also shows how the progressive digitalization of philology in recent decades has made it possible to put the concept of mouvance into practice.

Contributors include Theodore S. Beers, Jan J. van Ginkel, Khouloud Khalfallah, Mahmoud Kozae, Rima Redwan, and Johannes Stephan.

Listen on the New Books Network