Enjoying a wide transmission during the Middle Ages, Barlaam and Ioasaph tells the story of a pagan prince, Ioasaph, whose spiritual crisis is allayed only by the preaching of the Christian ascetic Barlaam. Recent studies have repeated the standard claim that the core of the novel was the Christianisation of the life of the historical Buddha, Śākyamuni Gautama. However, this reconstruction is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons.

Basso’s approach contextualizes BkI in the larger category of texts whose authors are anonymous and whose content is open and not firmly structured. The analysis of textual transmission of texts like these cannot follow the same rules as standard philology, the so-called Lachmannian stemma codicum. Basso proposes to call this alternative explanation theory the “Karussell-Modell” in opposition to the Baum-Modell, since it takes into due consideration the carousel-like diffusion of stories, dramatically different from the model of the genealogical transmission of manuscripts. Stories, unlike closed texts, continued travelling in a spiral-like movement, along the cultural highways of the Late Antique world, from India and Iran through Syria to Greece, and back once more, in a sort of narrative Rückwanderung.