AHRC-DFG grant for Bettina Bildhauer

Bettina Bildhauer, together with her co-investigator Jutta Eming (Freie Universität Berlin) have won an AHRC-DFG grant for UK-German collaborative research projects in the humanities for project “The Seven Sages of Rome: editing and reappraising a forgotten premodern classic from global and gendered perspectives”. This is a joint award by the the AHRC and the equivalent German funding body Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, with funding totalling over £915,000 over three years.

The Seven Sages of Rome is the most famous premodern text of which nobody has ever heard, and this project aims to change that. This story cycle, told in at least 30 languages from Central Asia to Iceland over more than five centuries, recounts a medieval #metoo story of a fake rape accusation between a mute prince and his young stepmother at a royal court, and the impossibility of establishing the truth.

The project will reappraise the text's gender politics from the perspective of recent gender studies. Most of the versions have not yet been edited or even identified, and a first step towards this will be taken by collating and expanding the available factual information on the transmission. The researchers will also edit one of The Seven Sages' earliest versions from a multilingual hub, the Dutch tradition. Seeing each of the different versions as part of a transcultural rather than monolingual tradition will give new impulses to the study of medieval and early modern literature.

The new edition and repertory of versions will be freely available online for anyone wanting to find out more about our shared transcultural rather than national or "Western" history. Academics from across the different national philologies concerned, as well as from medieval and early modern studies and gender studies generally will benefit from this project's practical and theoretical groundwork.