Crescentia's Oriental Relatives: The "Tale of the Pious Man and His Chaste Wife" in the Arabian Nights and the sources of Crescentia in Near Eastern narrative tradition.(Critical essay)

Introduction

The "Tale of the Pious Man and His Chaste Wife" is one of several tales of which varying though closely related versions are contained in the different redactions of the Arabian Nights. Essentially, the tale narrates the adventures of a pious and chaste married woman who, during the absence of her husband, faces repeated attempts of seduction, evades them all through her uncompromising chastity and faithfulness, and in the end triumphs by curing the evildoers from the physical afflictions they have suffered as a result of their sinful behavior. In terms of content and structure, the tale belongs to the genre of the "innocent persecuted heroine," numerous versions of which exist in international narrative literature (Moser-Rath; Jones). In folkloristic terms, it is a variant of tale type AT 712: Crescentia (Aarne and Thompson 247-48; Uther, Types 386-87). The tale type derives its denomination from the name of the protagonist in what is commonly regarded as the tale's oldest documented version as contained in the German Kaiserchronik, an epic poem written toward the middle of the twelfth century (Uther, "Crescentia"). Considering its prominent position in German and world literature, the tale has repeatedly been the subject of extensive studies since the middle of the nineteenth century. (1) Already in the nineteenth century, literary historians had noticed the striking similarity between the tale of Crescentia and the tale of "The Pious Man and His Chaste Wife" in the Arabian Nights, probably first in relation to the sources of Shakespeare's Cymbeline (Echtermeyer, Henschel, and Simrock 211-12). As there was little doubt that the version of the Arabian Nights was comparatively recent, subsequent research took great pains to locate other and, notably, earlier Oriental versions of the tale. These efforts led to identifying another early modern Near Eastern version in the tale of Repsima in Francois Petis de la Croix's narrative collection Les Mille et un Jours ("The Thousand and One Days," 1710-12). While compiled in emulation of Antoine Galland's contemporary Mille et une Nuits ("The Thousand and One Nights," 1704-17), Petis de la Croix's collection ultimately relies on an Ottoman Turkish compilation of the "Relief after Hardship" genre, whose oldest preserved manuscript is dated 784/1382. (2) They also succeeded in documenting the tale in Persian author Zeya'oddin Nakhshabi's Tuti-name ("Book of the Parrot"), completed in the Muslim year 730, corresponding to CE 1329-30 (Pertsch 536-38; Hatami 108-10, no. 52, night 32), of which numerous later Oriental versions in various languages exist (Marzolph, "Papageienbuch"), some of which, such as Sari 'Abdullah's seventeenth-century Ottoman Turkish adaptation (Rosen 61-74), contain the tale under consideration. As the Tuti-name in general is known to constitute a Persian adaptation of the Indian S'ukasaptati ("Seventy [Tales of a] Parrot"), a work of considerable age, scholars such as Theodor Benfey went on to speculate about an eventual Indian origin of the tale (Benfey 3: 71; Stevanovic 466; Spies 413). Others, notably Svetislav Stefanovic, preferred to rely on the chronological evidence of the earlier version in the German Kaiserchronik as their basis to argue for the tale's origin in Western literature, from where it would have migrated to the East (Stefanovic; Grundtvig; Uther, "Crescentia" 170). The majority of scholars today, however, agree on the tale's unspecified "Oriental" origin, notwithstanding both the chronological priority of the Western versions and the apparent unavailability of Oriental versions serving as ultimate proof of their hypothesis. (3) Recently discovered Persian and Arabic versions, one of which predates the Western ones by as much as two centuries, now prove the tale's Near Eastern origin beyond reasonable doubt. The fact that at least one of these texts (Ritter, Meer 353-56) had been available in a Western--to be exact, German--translation since the middle of the twentieth century serves as a further argument, if such an argument is needed, for a transdisciplinary cooperation in the field of comparative literary studies as the only promising way to arrive at sound conclusions in matters of transnational narrative research (van der Kooi).

In introducing the Oriental versions of the "Tale of the Pious Man and His Chaste Wife," I propose first taking a closer look at the three varying versions of the tale in different redactions of the Arabian Nights--those texts that were first recognized as "Oriental" analogues to the tale of Crescentia. The ensuing discussion focuses on hitherto unknown Persian and Arabic texts that on the one hand document the tale's tradition in the medieval Near Eastern literatures and on the other ultimately predate the Western versions. In conclusion, and returning to the point of start, I suggest a link between the medieval Oriental versions and the tale's appearance in the Arabian Nights. No two of the versions discussed here are identical, and each one of them would deserve a thorough analysis of its content, embedded meaning, and author's intention. This important task will have to be relegated to a later opportunity, as in this essay I focus on the tale's textual history. Translations of the majority of texts discussed here for the first time are given in the translation section of this issue.

Versions of the Arabian Nights

The "Tale of the Pious Man and His Chaste Wife" does not belong to the core corpus of the Arabian Nights and is not contained in any of the manuscripts predating Galland's introduction of the Arabian Nights into world literature at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Probably the best-known version of the tale in the Arabian Nights is contained in what has been termed "Zotenberg's Egyptian redaction" (hereafter, ZER). This redaction, established in research by French scholar Herman Zotenberg, refers to a group of manuscripts that was probably compiled in Egypt in the latter half of the eighteenth century (Marzolph and van Leeuwen 2: 740). Manuscripts of ZER far exceed the fragmentary redactions such as the one serving as the basis of Galland's adaptation, with ZER's numerous additional fantastic, wonderful, and entertaining tales having been extracted from a variety of sources. As ZER manuscripts were used for both the Bulaq and Calcutta II editions, published in 1835 and 1839-42 respectively, which in their turn served as the basis of the majority of translations into Western languages, this version is widespread. The ZER version is relatively short, covering some three pages in Richard Burton's rendering (Burton 5: 256-59; Marzolph and van Leeuwen 1: 242-43, no. 163; Chauvin 3: 154-55, no. 321).

The story introduces a Jewish qadi (judge) and his beautiful and chaste wife. When the qadi sets out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he entrusts his wife to the care of his brother. As soon as the qadi has left, his brother, who had long been lusting for the woman, asks her favors, and since she refuses, calumniates her with false witnesses before the king, who subsequently orders her to be stoned to death. Although she is buried in a pit and stoned, she survives and is rescued by a villager, who takes her home. The villager's wife cures her and eventually entrusts their infant child to be nursed by her. Next, a stranger lusts for her and, as she does not give in to his advances, schemes to kill her. Attacking her at night, he instead kills the infant sleeping by her side. The next morning, the mother accuses her of having killed the child, but the villager who had rescued her believes her pledge of innocence and sends her away without punishment. With the little money she has with her, she frees a man who had been fixed to a tree stump in retaliation for some unnamed crime. Out of gratitude, the man builds her a cell where she takes to worshipping God and eventually gains renown for the curative powers of her prayers. Meanwhile, the brother of the woman's husband has been smitten with cancer, the villager's wife suffers from leprosy, and the stranger who killed the child has been afflicted with palsy. Together, they visit the saintly woman and on her demand confess their crimes, gain forgiveness, and are healed. In the end, all take to worshipping God "till Death parted them."

The second version to be discussed is contained in the Breslau redaction of the ...