Season 1, Episode 9
Bovo-Buch is Elia Levita's 16th century Yiddish treatment of the popular Italian chivalric romance Buovo d’Antona. Chivalric romances, popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe, are narratives which celebrate courtly love and manners and most often feature the adventures of heroic knights going on quests. Bovo-Buch, which was extremely popular among Ashkenazi Jewish communities of the time, adopts and adapts this form to its own purposes and is an example of the convergence that occurs when a narrative is introduced into a new cultural context.
Dr. Erith Jaffe-Berg, Professor of theatre at the Department of Theatre, Film and Digital Production, University of California at Riverside, explains the cultural collision inherent in the book and illuminates its historical context.
This extended episode is a reimagining of a three-episode series titled “Bovo-Buch: Chivalric Romance, Cultural Collision,” which we originally presented in September 2020 on Judaism Unbound.
Read the transcription for "The Book of Bovo"
THE TEAM
Hosted by Aaron Henne
Scholarship provided by Erith Jaffe-Berg, PhD
Edited by Mark McClain Wilson
Story editing by Clay Steakley with Aaron Henne and Julie A. Lockhart
Featuring the voices of Joshua Wolf Coleman, Joe Jordan, Julie A. Lockhart, Rebecca Rasmussen, Clay Steakley, Diana Tanaka, and Mark McClain Wilson, with Yiddish from the original text read by Miri Koral of the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language
Theme music composed by Michael Skloff and produced by Sam K.S.
Transcription by Dylan Southard
"The Book of Bovo" Learning Resources
Learn more about:
Bovo-Buch, translation by Jerry C. Smith
read the complete text of Bevis of Hampton
Also referenced in the episode:
Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, Edited by David B. Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri
Exercises For Educators:
"The Book of Bovo" for Youth Learners (PDF)
"The Book of Bovo" for Adult and Teen Learners (PDF)
Watch with captions on YouTube:
Also From Our Artists
A Long Time Ago... To accompany the episode, we invite you to enjoy a piece of video art by theatre dybbuk's resident lighting designer, Brandon Baruch. In the video, you can see the lighting scheme that Brandon designed to accompany text taken from Jerry C. Smith's English translation of Bovo-Buch, as read by actors Joshua Wolf Coleman, Joe Jordan, and Diana Tanaka.