• Research,

The LiPoL Project

2020-2024

Published on February 2, 2022 Updated on February 2, 2022

Popular Levantine Literature: Archiving, Analysing and Recounting the Tale of Baybars in the 21st Century.

The LiPoL research programme aims to harness the potential of the recently published Tale of Baybars (Presses de l’Ifpo, 2000-2020, 18 volumes) in order to give new impetus to research on the popular literature of the Near East and on Middle Arabic, its dominant linguistic register. Organised around three axes, Language, Society and Aesthetics, it brings together researchers from different humanities fields, with the aim of studying the text in its linguistic, literary, historical and cultural dimensions. The programme includes a major digital component: both the critical edition of the text and the storytellers’ handwritten notebooks on which it relies (about 60,000 folios digitised to date) will be made available to the scientific community online in open access.

Composed of more than ten million characters, this text is the largest corpus ever published in Middle Arabic and constitutes a unique research object in this field.


Project leader: Université Lumière Lyon 2

Project partner: Philippe Bourmaud: Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University (UMR 5190 – LARHRA, the Rhône-Alpes Centre for Historical Research)

Project length: 48 months