Spiegelungen in Daṇḍin’s Mirror: A Comparative Pursuit in the Translatability of Narrative Modes, Historicity, Prose, and Vernacularism across French and Asian Medieval Historiography

The foci of the Global Middle Ages approach, which are aimed at observations of panoptic historic ties of cultural negotiation, interpenetration, and hybridity, are here inverted to a comparative discussion of what is in the observer. This is a rhetorical attempt to take a step back from empirical studies of cultural translations and turn to questions of epistemic translatability as facilitated in the observer by global relations of similarity in difference. The case in point will be the American medievalist Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s applied and theoretical work on thirteenth-century French chronicles, critically assessed in terms of its relevance for the analysis of medieval Asian historiography.