The Seven Sages of Rome
The Seven Sages of Rome is the most famous premodern text of which nobody has ever heard. This project aims to change that. The story cycle, told in at least 32 languages from Central Asia to Iceland from the eleventh to the nineteenth century, centres on a non-consensual sexual encounter between a silent prince and his stepmother. Boccaccio, Chaucer and Shakespeare have all borrowed stories from this text, and yet the sheer scale of the transmission has so far put scholars off investigating it.
Our project, funded by a UK German collaborative research project in the humanities grant jointly by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, provides the first digital overview of the story matter. Postdoctoral researcher Dr Jane Bonsall and Principal Investigator Bettina Bildhauer have, in conjunction with Maximilian Nöth at the Centre for Digital Philology at the University of Würzburg, assembled details of almost a thousand manuscripts and print editions in Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Persian, Polish, Scots, Spanish, Turkish, Welsh, Yiddish and many other languages.
Postdoctoral researcher Dr Rita Schlusemann and Prof Jutta Eming at the Free University Berlin have also edited the Dutch translations of the story, and translated it into German. Bettina Bildhauer has translated the text into English.
A special collection of the Open Library of Humanities Journal brings together scholarship especially on the gender relations in this challenging story matter. The Seven Sages, also known as The Book of Sindbad, uses storytelling and legal procedures to try to establish the truth about the sexualised violence at the heart of the story. We have been able to show that a ‘translingual’ approach, seeing this story matter as a whole rather than divided into national languages, can show the shared cultural heritage of a tightly connected Eurasia even in the Middle Ages, and rewrite literary history in favour of the texts that premodern people actually listened to and read.
