The wife of the Roman emperor Diocletian gives birth to a son, Florentine, and dies shortly after. When Florentine is seven, Diocletian gives the boy to the seven sages of Rome, who take him to a school outside the city, where they teach him for seven years. In the meantime, Diocletian remarries. Although Florentine’s stay outside Rome is kept secret, the new empress soon discovers the boy’s existence and plots his destruction. The empress organizes Florentine’s return to Rome, whereupon she offers him her love and, when she is rejected, simulates an attempted rape. Florentine cannot defend himself against the empress’s accusations because he has seen in the stars that if he speaks before the eighth day after his return to Rome both he and the sages will be lost; only the intervention of Diocletian’s lords secures the postponement of his judgment for a day. That night, the empress tells a story that reignites the emperor’s ire but the next morning a further stay of execution is procured by one of the sages, who tells a story that changes the emperor’s mind. So begins a week-long exchange of tales between the empress and the sages, who speak for Florentine. On the eighth day after his arrival in Rome, Florentine tells his own story and denounces his stepmother, who is burnt on the pyre that she meant for him.

This, in brief, is the story told in the Middle English Seven Sages of Rome. The poem belongs to a long tradition of storytelling linking medieval England to the continent and Asia; its popularity in England and elsewhere in the Middle Ages contrasts with its relative neglect in anglophone scholarship. We attribute this neglect in part to the absence of a good teaching text of the Middle English Seven Sages and we aim to remedy this lack with the present METS edition of the Auchinleck copy of the poem. At the same time, with the apparatus that we provide, we hope to highlight the interest that the Seven Sages holds for a broad constituency of medievalists. In particular, the text is a rich source of evidence for anyone working on the histories of east-to-west cultural transfer, the exemplum and exemplary writing, and misogyny. The impressive transmission history of the Seven Sages makes possible comparative approaches to these topics that consider, for example, the ways in which attitudes towards women in fiction might change over time and from place to place. With a view to facilitating enquiries of this kind, our Explanatory Notes record plot variations across different languages and versions of the Seven Sages as well as between the extant Middle English texts of the poem.

This Introduction describes first the origins and transmission of the Seven Sages of Rome and next the Middle English texts of the poem and the manuscripts in which they survive; we also give our reasons for choosing to edit the Auchinleck text. We then discuss the reception of the Seven Sages in scholarship; offer a reading of one of the poem’s inset tales; and advance an approach to the text’s misogyny. Notwithstanding the judicial context in which the inset tales are couched, we contend that they are best read as a commentary on their given purposes rather than as an illustration of them. The text’s equivocal presentation of its arguments extends to the misogyny of its frame. We propose that the Seven Sages makes patent the contradictions at the heart of misogynist rhetoric and that at key moments the collection generates sympathy for the women whose lives it depicts.

Origins and transmission

The roots of the Seven Sages of Rome can be traced back to western and south Asian story-telling traditions. The text takes its frame narrative and four of its tales from the Book of Sindbad, a work surviving in ten versions whose earliest, now lost, redaction is thought to have originated in Persia at the end of the eighth century CE. Over the following centuries, this putative Middle Persian original was translated into later forms of Persian and into Arabic, and from Arabic into Syriac, Greek, Spanish, and Hebrew. The dating of these versions is difficult to determine. Many of the surviving manuscripts of the Book of Sindbad postdate the composition of the versions that they transmit, often by a significant margin, and the extant texts have paratextual materials referring back to precedent texts that are now lost. The most recent work on the transmission of the Book of Sindbad argues that the Arabic version preserved as part of the One Hundred and One Nights is the closest analogue to the Middle Persian composition standing at the root of the tradition.

In Table 1 we list the extant texts of the Book of Sindbad and give the translations of these works that we refer to in this edition. Versions thought to have been composed earlier are listed towards the top of the table with texts thought to have been composed later towards the bottom. We draw this rough chronology from Bettina Krönung, “Fighting with Tales 1.”

Table 1: Texts and Translations of the Book of Sindbad

Siglum	Language	Title and Translation Used (1)
SindA101	Arabic	“Story of the Prince and the Seven Viziers” in A One Hundred and One Nights, ed. and trans. Fudge, pp. 216–81.
SindA	Arabic	The Seven Viziers in Istanbul, Şehid Ali Paşa Library, MS 2743 (2).
SindA1001	Arabic	“The King and His Seven Viziers” in The Arabian Nights, trans. Lyons, 2:546–610.
SindSyr	Syriac	“The History of Sindban and the Seven Wise Masters” trans. Gollancz.
SindGr	Greek	The Byzantine Sinbad by Michael Andreopoulos, trans. Beneker and Gibson.
SindP1	Persian	Le Livre des sept vizirs by Zahiri of Samarqand, trans. Bogdanović (3).
SindSp	Spanish	The Book of the Wiles of Women trans. Keller.
SindHeb	Hebrew	Tales of Sendebar ed. and trans. Epstein.
SindP2	Persian	“The Book of Sindibād” extracted in The Book of Sindibād, ed. Clouston, pp. 3–121 (4).
SindP3	Persian	“Story of the Prince, the Seven Viziers, and [. . .] His Father’s Handmaiden” in Nakhshabi, The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ṭūṭī-nāma, ed. and trans. Simsar, pp. 55–68.

Notes on the Table:

• (1) For references to editions of these texts in their original languages, see Krönung, “Fighting with Tales 1.”

• (2) There is no translation of SindA into a language that we can read.

• (3) We know of no English translation of SindP1.

• (4) The Book of Sindibād, ed. Clouston, provides a partial account of SindP2 rather than a full translation.

It is via one or more of these versions that the Book of Sindbad became known in the west, where in the second half of the twelfth century it appeared in French as the Roman des sept sages de Rome. In the process of transmission, the text’s Persian roots were almost totally effaced. A variety of channels has been proposed for the transfer, including written transmission from Greek to Latin, Hebrew to Latin, or Arabic to Spanish, as well as oral transmission between Christian and Arab territories, perhaps as a consequence of crusader traffic. Whatever the vector or vectors of transmission by which the Book of Sindbad reached Europe, the Seven Sages was so speedily adapted and translated that by the end of the Middle Ages, the story collection was circulating in all the major European vernaculars and in Latin. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the text’s most diligent bibliographer, Killis Campbell, counted at least forty different versions of the work surviving in more than two hundred manuscripts and nearly two hundred and fifty early prints.

The transmission history of the Seven Sages is complex; Campbell provides the overview that remains standard. For the purposes of this edition, Campbell’s scheme can be simplified as follows:

The now lost first redaction of the Seven Sages, written in the second half of the twelfth century, in French verse, V, gives rise to three more versions in French: K, in verse; D*, in prose, derhymed from a text closely related to K; and A*, a prose abbreviation. A* then gives rise to numerous translations, referred to as the A group or branch, which includes all the Middle English verse versions and a Welsh version as well as another French prose version, L, which follows A* closely except in its selection of inset tales at its close. The A group also includes a Latin prose version, H, which gives rise to its own group, including translations into English prose and Scots verse; a group of Italian texts, I; and another French prose version, M, which rewrites the Seven Sages to take account of the sequel romances that the work attracted. In a shorter, independent line of transmission, the Dolopathos (Do), a late twelfth-century Latin prose version of the Seven Sages materials, was translated into French verse in the thirteenth century. An abbreviated Latin prose version of the Seven Sages, S, was also compiled as part of Johannes Gobi’s Scala celi in the early fourteenth century.

Although this summary presents the processes of translation and adaptation sequentially, it should be borne in mind that the chronology of the manuscripts does not always match up with the order of Campbell’s scheme. The unique surviving copy of D* post-dates the earliest Middle English translations of A*, for example. It is also the case that readers could have simultaneous access to texts belonging to different branches of transmission. Thus, the Middle Scots text of the Seven Sages combines elements belonging to both Campbell’s groups A and H.

This edition cites the French texts of the Seven Sages as is shown in Table 2. Our ordering of the versions in this table reflects the presumed order of their composition, which does not correspond to the order in which the surviving manuscripts were made. We rank the texts from earliest (K) to latest (M).

Table 2: French Texts of the Seven Sages

Siglum	Editions Used, with their Base Copies	MS Date (1)
K	Le Roman des sept sages de Rome ed. Speer and Foehr-Janssens (2) Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 1553.	Late 1200s
D*	Deux rédactions du Roman des sept sages ed. Paris, pp. 1–54 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 5036. (3)	1400s
A*	Les Sept sages de Rome ed. Derniame, Henin, and Nais Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 2137.	Late 1200s
L	“Roman des sept sages de Rome” ed. Le Roux de Lincy Paris Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 19166.	1200s
M	Li Ystoire de la male marastre ed. Runte Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Ashburnham 52.	1300s

Notes on the Table:

• (1) We reproduce the manuscript dates given by their editors.

• (2) See too the earlier edition with English apparatus, Le Roman des sept sages de Rome, ed. Speer.

• (3) K and D* are extant only in the manuscripts cited above. The other texts survive in multiple manuscripts. For further details, see Le Roman des sept sages de Rome, ed. Speer and Foehr-Janssens, pp. 12–17.

In this edition, we also refer to a sample of texts representing other groups, languages, and traditions: the Welsh A text (Aw); two early modern H texts in English (He) and Scots (Hs); and the Latin Dolopathos (Do) and Scala celi (Stairway to Heaven) (S) redactions, as is shown in Table 3. Under “Insular texts” and “Latin texts,” the versions are given in their presumed order of composition; again, this order does not correspond to the order in which the surviving manuscripts were made. We list the earliest versions first.

Table 3: Some Other Renditions of the Seven Sages Materials

Siglum	Text	Editions and Translations Used, with their Base Copies	MS Date
Aw	Insular	“The Seven Wise Men of Rome” trans. Jones Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 120.	end 1700s (1)
He	Insular	The History of the Seven Wise Masters of Rome ed. Gomme Thystorye of ye vii. wyse maysters of Rome, ed. Wynkyn de Worde.	1506? (2)
Hs	Insular	The Buke of the Sevyne Sagis ed. Van Buuren Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 16500.	ca. 1515 (3)
Do	Latin	Dolopathos by Johannes de Alta Silva, trans. Gilleland Luxemburg, Bibliothèque nationale, MS 110.	end 1200s (4)
S	Latin	Abbreviated redaction in Johannes Gobi the Younger’s Scala celi trans. Beaulieu. In Beaulieu, Education, prédication, et cultures, pp. 213–32 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 13538.	1400s (5)

Notes on the Table:

• (1) The text of the Seven Sages that Jones translates was copied in the late eighteenth century from a fifteenth century manuscript, now Oxford, Jesus College, MS 20. For details of these manuscripts, see Gadsden, “Chwedleu Seith Doethon Rufein.”

• (2) Gomme dates this text to 1520 but STC 21298 gives “1506?” as the date of the publication. Where Gomme’s copy of the de Worde text is deficient, he supplies the missing text from a chap-book dating to 1671 (this procedure is described on his p. iii).

• (3) For this date, see van Buuren, The Buke of the Sevyne Sagis, p. 1.

• (4) For this date, see Historia septem sapientum, ed. Hilka, p. vii.

• (5) For this date, see Beaulieu, Education, prédication, et cultures, pp. 53–79.

In the Explanatory Notes, we focus on elucidating the relationships between the Middle English texts of the Seven Sages and the versions listed in tables 1–3. Consultation of the Book of Sindbad in its various manifestations allows for a sense of how the narrative frame of the work and its stories change as they move through time and space. The French and Latin versions include the source of the Middle English poems (A*) as well as several close analogues; they are representative of versions of the work that English audiences might have met either at home or abroad. The inclusion of a Welsh text (Aw) and later versions in English (He) and Scots (Hs) completes the Insular perspective on the Seven Sages. The Dolopathos (Do) serves as a reminder of the track that the Seven Sages did not take. It may be that some of the distinguishing features of the Dolopathos restricted its popularity. In contrast to the Seven Sages, the narrator of the Dolopathos is monastic; his perspective is anti-courtly and anti-woman throughout; and the empress is given no tales of her own to tell. Finally, the Scali celi redaction (S) is an abbreviation of a now lost Liber de septem sapientibus; the morals that it draws from the inset tales on occasion differ from those offered in the other versions of the collection.

The Middle English texts of the Seven Sages of Rome and their manuscripts

There are eight extant manuscript copies of the Middle English Seven Sages of Rome. Following Campbell, the poem’s editors group these texts into three versions that correspond to the dialects in which they were written: southern, midland, and northern. Campbell determined that all eight of the Middle English texts of the Seven Sages derive from one original Middle English translation of the French prose text A*. At the same time, Campbell also showed that none of the Middle English texts copies from any of the other extant texts. A corollary of this observation is that there must have been more copies of the Middle English poem circulating in the Middle Ages than now survive. The textual history that Campbell describes also indicates the importance of oral transmission in the propagation of the work.

Table 4 lists the manuscript copies of the Middle English Seven Sages as well as the important scholarly editions by Brunner, Campbell, and Whitelock to which we have referred. We group the texts as these editors do, according to dialect; within these groupings the order follows the date of manuscript production. The composition of the poem must predate the making of the Auchinleck Manuscript (1330s) but it is not clear by how long. Campbell suggests that the parent translation of the Middle English Seven Sages was written ca. 1275.

Table 4: Middle English Texts of the Seven Sages

Siglum	Version, Editor	Versions and Editions Used, with Copies	MS Date (1)
A	Southern, ed. Brunner	Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 19.2.1 Auchinleck Manuscript, fols. 85r–99v (ff. 334) (2)	1330s
Ar	Southern, ed. Brunner	London, British Library, MS Arundel 140, fols. 152r–165v (of the first booklet, ff.165; a second booklet was added later)	Early 1400s
E	Southern, ed. Brunner	London, British Library, MS Egerton 1995, fols. 3r–54v (ff. 58)	Late 1400s
F	Southern, ed. Brunner	Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38, fols. 134–156v (ff. 261) (3)	ca. 1500
B	Southern, ed. Brunner	Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354, fols. 18r–54r / pp. 39–112 (ff. 242 / pp. 514)	Early 1500s
D	Midland, ed. Whitelock	Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.1.17, fols. 54r–63r (of the third volume of this manuscript; vol. 1 is ff. 261; vol. 2 is ff. 93; vol. 3 is ff.87)	Late 1300s
R	Northern, ed. Campbell	Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson poet. 175, fols. 109r–131v (ff. 136)	Mid 1300s
C	Northern, ed. Campbell	London, British Library, MS Cotton Galba E. IX, fols. 25r–48r (ff. 114) (4)	Early 1400s

Notes on the Table:

• (1) These dates are from Whitelock.

• (2) Brunner takes A as his base text for the extant text of A and gives variant readings from Ar, B, and E. Where A lacks text, Brunner gives parallel texts of the other southern versions; the texts of Ar and F are also incomplete. The abbreviation “ff.” is used to indicate the total number of folios in the manuscript.

• (3) Brunner transcribes F independently at pp. 193–210 and 129–92.

• (4) Campbell edits C listing variants from R, which is incomplete.

Manuscript transmission

The manuscripts that contain the Middle English Seven Sages are a valuable source of information regarding the poem’s late-medieval readers and audiences. The following survey aims to draw out patterns in their compilation and the reader profiles that they implicate. Our aim is to narrativize and otherwise flesh out the information that we give more schematically in Table 4. We hold back more detailed descriptions of our base text A for the next subsection of this Introduction; on the language and scribes of A and on E, which we use to supplement A where A is deficient, see too the commentary in How We Made This Edition.

The earliest manuscript containing the Middle English Seven Sages is the Auchinleck Manuscript (A). Produced in London in the 1330s, Auchinleck was written by six scribes whose clear bookhands, treatment of mise-en-page, and collaboration all suggest a lay, commercial production context. Today, Auchinleck contains 44 items across 334 parchment folios (250 x 190mm in format), although originally it was larger and had at least 60 items. Numerous leaves have been lost or intentionally cut out and there is no trace of an original binding, the current modern binding being at least the manuscript’s third. Despite these losses, Auchinleck preserves a wide array of Middle English verse texts, many unique or in their earliest copies, including hagiographical, devotional, moral, historical, and satirical works. It is perhaps most famous today for its large collection of romances, several of which treat the establishment and defense of England by iconic figures such as Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, Arthur, and Horn.

For a manuscript containing almost entirely Middle English material, Auchinleck was quite lavishly produced. It is likely that many of its items were introduced by a miniature, resulting in fifty or more illuminated illustrations across the book (all but five of these have since been removed or lost to damage). In its layout and decoration, Auchinleck most closely resembles books containing French and Latin that were being produced for members of the elite of London society at around the same time. The great expense its manufacture must have incurred — which may have included the translation of some of its items — indicates that its first owners were very wealthy. Book historians argue for a mercantile, noble, or even royal commissioner. It may have been a book associated with the court of Edward III. There are links between Auchinleck and the books owned by Walter de Milemete, courtier and tutor to Edward before he became king. Another possible owner is Edward III’s queen, Philippa of Hainaut.

The manuscript of the Middle English Seven Sages that is most like Auchinleck in respect of content is Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.2.38 (F). As it now stands, having lost leaves at various points, this book contains 43 items across 261 folios. The first quarter of the book (63 folios) contains 33 shorter texts covering basic doctrinal instruction, moral topics, saints lives, and texts concerned with the proper upbringing, education, and behavior of members of the patriarchal household, such as How the Goode Man Taght Hys Sone, How a Merchande Dyd Hys Wyfe Betray, and A Gode Mater of The Marchand and Hys Sone. The remaining bulk of the volume includes the Seven Sages alongside nine other romances, three of which are shared with Auchinleck (Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, and Sir Degaré, the Seven Sages coming between Bevis and Guy). While this book would have been a less costly production than the Auchinleck Manuscript — it lacks decoration and is written on paper — its format is sizable (297 x 210mm) and it appears to have been produced by a commercial scribe for a bourgeois urban household. Because the scribe’s dialect can be located to Leicester and because the book shares a paper stock with another manuscript whose connections to Leicester are secure — Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61 — it has been argued that CUL Ff.2.38 was produced for use by a patron in that town.

London, British Library, MS Arundel 140 (Ar) differs from both CUL Ff.2.38 and the Auchinleck Manuscript in its provision of co-texts for the Middle English Seven Sages. Alongside our poem, the Arundel codex compiles copies of Ypotis, Mandeville’s Travels, the Speculum Gy de Warewyke, and the Prick of Conscience. These are all interesting companion pieces for the Seven Sages. Mandeville’s Travels narrates a voyage across the Islamic world and shows a clear fascination with the east that contrasts with the studious avoidance in the Seven Sages of any mention of its source in the Book of Sindbad. The frame of the Seven Sages is mirrored in Ypotis, which gives a dialogue between a wise child and the Roman emperor Hadrian. Hadrian interrogates the child on topics ranging from the origins of heaven and earth to the varieties of sin and the means of their overcoming; at the text’s close, the child declares that he is Christ and departs for heaven.

The copy of the Speculum Gy in Arundel 140 links the book to the Auchinleck Manuscript, which also has a copy of this text, but the Arundel manuscript’s support — paper leaves measuring 290 x 215mm — combined with its lack of decoration suggest that its audience was more like that addressed by CUL Ff.2.38. The interest in penitence manifested in CUL Ff.2.38 is amplified in Arundel 140, which contains a copy of the popular Prick of Conscience. Arundel’s moralizing impetus may have made it an attractive host for the copy of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Melibee with which it was bound in the later fifteenth century.

The Prick of Conscience is copied with the Middle English Seven Sages in two further manuscripts: London, British Library, MS Cotton Galba E. IX (C) and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poet. 175 (R). Both these books have been attributed to a team of North Yorkshire scribes who made books for laypeople; study of the ownership marks in the codices shows that they stayed in the vicinity of their production — possibly Ripon in North Yorkshire — into the early modern period. Galba E. IX puts the Middle English Seven Sages and the Prick of Conscience alongside a Middle English translation of Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier au lion, passion lyrics, the historical poems of the northern writer, Laurence Minot, and two Middle English texts associated with Cursor mundi, a massive history of the world covering creation to Doomsday.

Galba E. IX is large in format (335 x 220mm) and written on parchment; it was probably designed for reading at a lectern. Rawlinson Poet. 175 is a more modest production. While this book is also written on parchment, its format is smaller (268 x 190mm), and the codex appears designed for private reading. Rawlinson Poet. 175 presents the Middle English Seven Sages and the Prick of Conscience alongside shorter religious items, which include the Gast of Gy, a purgatory poem that stages a conversation between a priest and Gy, formerly a citizen of the French town of Alés, who speaks of purgatory from beyond the grave.

All the manuscripts mentioned thus far seem to have been made with a lay audience in mind. In contrast, Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.1.17 (D) was probably produced for a religious house. This is another large format (440 x 305mm) parchment book designed for consultation at a lectern. It comprises three parts: parts one and two treat British and eastern history in Latin while part three contains miscellaneous materials in Middle English, including Mandeville’s Travels and Piers Plowman alongside the Seven Sages. Dialect analysis suggests that the scribe of the Middle English texts was trained in the North of England. Working backwards from what is known of the early modern ownership of the book, Ralph Hanna suggests that CUL Dd.1.17 was copied by a monk attached to Evesham Abbey who was on secondment at the abbey’s cell at Penwortham in Lancashire when he copied the book for his mother house.

The two manuscripts remaining to be treated have both been claimed as early examples of the commonplace book. Written on paper in a reasonably large format (280 x 195mm), London, British Library, MS Egerton 1995 (E) presents the Middle English Seven Sages followed by a miscellaneous collection of texts including a children’s courtesy book, lists of hunting terms, medical advice, a list of institutions in the city of London, and three historical texts: the Siege of Rouen, Lydgate’s list of kings after the Conquest, and William Gregory’s London chronicle. Egerton was written in the hand of a single scribe (except for marginalia) in a secretary script influenced by anglicana (that includes anglicana two-compartment a). The style of handwriting, neat ruling, even margins, single-column layout, decorative rubrication, and use of guide letters and catchwords together indicate a well-trained, skilled, and experienced scribe. The contents and visual features suggest that Egerton was professionally produced to order. We do not know the name of the scribe or of the original owner, and if there was an original binding then it is now lost. The choice of texts implicates a Londoner of middling social level, probably a merchant, whose interests ranged from those of the “rising London businessman” to those of a “literary hobbyist” who might want to read a poem like the Seven Sages.

Finally, Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354 (B) can be more securely located in London’s mercantile community. The manuscript is of paper and has a “holster book” format, being much taller than it is wide (290 x 110mm); it is a kind of book that could be sold blank and pre-bound for the recording of accounts. The scribe of Balliol 354, who was most likely identical with its early owner, Richard Hill, was by his own account a London grocer; he seems to have written the book over an extended period (1503–1536). His tastes are similar to the commissioner of Egerton 1995, extending from historical materials with a London focus to more practical and literary texts. Alongside its copy of the Middle English Seven Sages, Balliol 354 compiles extracts from John Gower’s Confessio amantis and a well-known group of Middle English lyrics. While both Egerton 1995 and Balliol 354 have selections of items that seem to respond primarily to personal tastes, the similarity between these books — they also share the Siege of Rouen, for example — suggests that they might equally manifest a shared set of predilections and concerns that defined the merchant community in late-medieval London.

As the foregoing analysis indicates, the Middle English Seven Sages reached a broad constituency of readers. In terms of rank and class, readers and owners ranged from among the highest levels of the social elite (if we accept that someone like Philippa of Hainaut was the patron of Auchinleck) to the more middling secular readerships and households implicated by CUL Ff.2.38 and Arundel 140 and the mercantile readers of Egerton 1995 and Balliol 345. CUL Dd.1.17 demonstrates that, in at least one instance, the poem was also copied for an audience of professional religious. In terms of their location, readers of the Middle English Seven Sages could be found in or around towns from London to Leicester in the midlands and Ripon in the north. The dates of the surviving manuscripts show that the poem was being read at these locations from the early fourteenth into the sixteenth centuries.

Further evidence for the reception of the Middle English Seven Sages can be gleaned from the texts with which it was compiled, which implicate audiences interested in penitential as well as romance literature. The format and appearance of the manuscripts are also telling. The varying sizes of the books could foster a range of reading modes with the larger books inviting more studious reading, or perhaps oral performance, and the smaller, less pretentious ones supporting private reading. Some of the manuscripts were clearly designed to be seen and shared, such as the Auchinleck Manuscript with its many illustrations, whereas others such as Balliol 354 might have been more personal productions.

All of this makes patent the successful implantation of the Middle English Seven Sages in an impressive variety of late-medieval reading contexts. As was pointed out above, there were probably other manuscripts of the poem circulating in the Middle Ages that are now lost. If these codices had survived, we would have been able to extend our reception history further still. To this material evidence of the work’s transmission we can add the evidence of later authors. Gower appears to have known a version of the Seven Sages, and Chaucer may have done so too.

The Auchinleck Seven Sages of Rome

Even within their dialect groupings, the eight texts of the Seven Sages differ quite broadly from one another and from the French prose text A* that Campbell identified as their source. These differences make each copy of the poem a rewarding object of study. Our decision to edit Auchinleck for this METS edition is in some ways traditional. A is the earliest surviving text of the poem and, as such, was chosen by Karl Brunner for his edition of the southern version. While it is not without its idiosyncrasies, which include a tendency to abbreviate materials found at greater length elsewhere, Campbell argues that the Auchinleck Seven Sages best preserves the language and wording of the parent translation from which all the Middle English texts derive. Where the Auchinleck text of the poem is deficient due to damage to the manuscript, we supply the text from the next closest manuscript of the southern version having these passages, MS Egerton 1995 (E).

A gives us a distinct variety of Middle English from in or around London ca. 1300; a similar variety of the language was used in three other Auchinleck texts: the romances Kyng Alisaunder, Of Arthour and of Merlin, and King Richard. These works show authors making intelligent use of French and Latin as well as English linguistic material. While some commentators have argued that they were written by the same person, others suggest that they were composed by different writers participating in a shared literary idiom that was cultivated in the capital around the turn of the fourteenth century. Either way, the author of the parent translation of the Middle English Seven Sages remains anonymous. All that we can say about them with any confidence is that they deserve special praise amongst the early translators of French romance for their rendering of the French prose text A* into octosyllabic rhyming couplets in Middle English. Whoever this redactor was, they affected a comprehensive re-envisioning of their source that fully exploited the creative potential inherent in earlier Middle English.

Notwithstanding the seniority and linguistic interest of A, we should admit that our choice of base text also reflects our longer-standing interest in the Auchinleck Manuscript. Indeed, it was our work on this book that initially brought us to the Seven Sages. Alison Wiggins is part of the team behind the online facsimile and edition of the Auchinleck Manuscript that is hosted by the National Library of Scotland (https://auchinleck.nls.uk(Opens in a new tab or window)). Her subsequent work on the book includes studies of its language and methods of production as well as of the manuscript’s central figure, Guy of Warwick. Rory Critten has focused on Auchinleck style and the affordances of the French-infused Middle English in which its texts are written; by emphasizing the book’s French debts, he has sought to complicate inherited descriptions of Auchinleck that profile its anglophone and anglophile credentials. We hope that this edition of the Auchinleck Seven Sages will encourage new work not only on the poem, by re-presenting its earliest extant copy, but also on the manuscript that contains it.

Scholarship on the Seven Sages of Rome

The popularity of the Seven Sages in the Middle Ages contrasts with its neglect in modern criticism, including criticism produced as part of a reawakening of interest in the Seven Sages more broadly. Two journals — Narrative Culture and Das Mittelalter — devote recent special issues to the Seven Sages, but neither features an article considering the work’s Middle English versions. This neglect ought probably to be attributed to the perception among Middle English scholars that the poem’s moralizations are not only distasteful but also definitive. A surface reading of the collection sees the sages’ stories about the untrustworthiness of women exemplified in the empress’s reprehensible behavior, which justifies her final punishment. This view of the work is only lightly modified in a more recent attempt to re-present the Middle English Seven Sages as medieval children’s literature.

Standing against these readings of the poem is the evidence that we have surveyed regarding its reception. As we have seen, book historians propose that the Auchinleck Manuscript was produced for a female patron, and the compilation of the poem alongside texts like the Prick of Conscience, Piers Plowman, and Mandeville’s Travels suggests that the audiences for whom it was copied could be expected to interact intellectually and emotionally with the materials they read. What then might the attraction of the work have been if it was not the misogyny that is so flagrant in plot summaries of the kind with which this Introduction opened?

At present, the best guides to the appeal of the Middle English Seven Sages are the scholars working on the French versions of the poem. Among the useful concepts introduced by these writers is the reading practice that Mary B. Speer calls “specular identification,” whereby readers of the inset tales are implicitly invited to consider the different ways in which the actors in these tales might reflect the characters in the frame narrative. Also illuminating is Yasmina Foehr-Janssens’s comparison between the Freudian dream and the inset tales, which in their presentation of players and motives condense the complex ethical and emotional engagements of the characters in the frame. Speer and Foehr-Janssens’s critical approaches help us to see beyond the judicial rhetoric of the frame narrative, in which the empress and the sages use tales to sway the emperor. Their insights encourage us to read the inset tales not as a confirmation of their stated purposes but as a commentary on them. In so doing, Speer and Foehr-Janssens make accessible the full ethical and psychological intelligence that animates the poem.

This argument can be illustrated by means of an example. As a test case, we take the first of the sages’ tales, canis, the tale of the dog. This is a tale that is central to both Speer’s and Foehr-Janssens’s analyses of the Seven Sages. At the same time as we aim to highlight the emotional and intellectual complexities that result from the tale’s embedding in the frame narrative of the Seven Sages, we also propose to demonstrate the benefits of comparative analysis, which can clarify the particular concerns animating the Middle English versions of the poem. As canis is one of the four tales that the Seven Sages carries over from the Book of Sindbad — the others are senescalcus, aper, and avis; the tales of the steward, the boar, and the bird — the archive for this story is especially rich.

A test case: canis

The first of the sages’ tales narrates the unhappy fate of a pet who saves his master’s baby from an attack by a snake while the baby is left unattended. Rather than being rewarded for its service, the dog is killed by its master on his return home. As it is told in the Auchinleck text (701–836), this outcome is blamed on the baby’s nurses and the knight’s wife. Returning home before the parents and, seeing the house covered in blood, the nurses assume that the dog has killed the baby, who is nowhere to be found: in the fight with the snake, its cradle has been overturned. Fleeing the house, the nurses encounter the knight’s wife, to whom they tell their story, with the result that the wife demands that her husband kill the dog. The knight agrees to his wife’s request, and, when he realizes his error, he departs barefoot into exile, declaring that his example should warn other men against believing their wives. The sage telling the tale doubles down on the knight’s moral (837–42). If the emperor acquiesces to his wife’s ultimatum and kills his son, then a similar fate should befall the emperor as befell the knight on account of his canicide.

For the sage who tells canis, the relationship between the frame narrative and the inset tale is clear. The knight stands in for the emperor, the faithful dog is his son, and the knight’s wife is the empress. The killing of the dog thus mirrors the killing of Florentine, which the sages hope to avoid. This interpretation of the tale persuades the emperor, who agrees to postpone his son’s judgement (843–46). But the interpretation of canis is not so straightforward for readers outside the narrative frame. To begin with, there are more players in the tale than in the frame. The son in the frame has a possible double in the baby as well as the dog, and it may be that this doubling reflects the emperor’s mixed feelings about his own progeny: he nurtures his son but he also resents him insofar as his son’s accession can only be accomplished at the cost of his own demise. The empress also has a second potential representative in the tale: the snake who attempts to kill the baby. But the snake might also represent the father. The gendering of the snake in the Auchinleck manuscript is equivocal; it is referred to by both masculine and feminine pronouns, so the creature might be read as a reflection of underlying filicidal urges within the father.

This is not to say that the sage’s story is poorly chosen. In the fortunate discovery of the unharmed baby at the tale’s close, canis holds out the possibility of a happy ending for the emperor. But the significance of the tale in the context of the Seven Sages frame exceeds that attributed to it by its teller. In particular, the inset story affords new insights into the psychology of the emperor and the emotional experience of succession, an idea that is of central importance in the poem.

The tale of the dog is included in all the versions of the Seven Sages as well as the Dolopathos and all the versions of the Book of Sindbad except SindA1001 and SindP3. It also has a life outside the Sindbad and Seven Sages traditions. Its history is revealing. In the earlier versions of the tale compiled in the Book of Sindbad, the story is told as a warning against hasty action; there it is the father who discovers the messy scene at home, draws the conclusion that the dog has killed the child, and kills the animal without any further prompting. The Middle English versions all agree with A*, their source, in making women responsible for the dog’s murder, but the northern and southern versions lay greater emphasis on this point than does the French text. These versions record the wife’s ultimatum to her husband (795–96); moralize generally on the perils of believing women (812–14); blame the wife for the dog’s death (820–22); and show the knight presenting his self-exile as a lesson to other men to ignore their wives’ counsel (823–26). Thus the misogyny already inherent in A* is enhanced in the two main Middle English versions. How is this development to be interpreted?

Misogyny in the Seven Sages of Rome

The antifeminist rhetoric of the Seven Sages — which, as we have just seen, is amplified in some Middle English versions of the poem — is an aspect of the text that twenty-first-century readers will most likely find off-putting. But the warnings of hasty judgment that animate canis should give us pause when interpreting the poem’s misogyny. Like the bloodied dog who greets his master in the inset tale, the self-mutilated empress who appears before her husband at the opening of the poem is a sign requiring careful consideration, notwithstanding the reading of her actions that we are given in the narrative frame. To begin with, we should recognize that the opening scene in which the empress accuses her stepson of an attempted rape is an iteration of a trope familiar to medieval readers.

When the Seven Sages shows the empress falsely accusing her stepson of an attempted rape, the text reiterates a motif that was best known in the medieval west in the form that it assumes in the biblical story of Potiphar’s wife. In Genesis 39, Joseph catches the eye of the wife of his master, Potiphar, who is a eunuch. Potiphar’s wife repeatedly asks Joseph to lie with her but Joseph refuses. One day, finding Joseph alone, the wife corners him and insists that he should sleep with her, with the result that Joseph flees. Seeing herself so slighted, and in danger of being discovered, the wife claims that Joseph has attempted to rape her; as proof she offers a piece of clothing that Joseph has left behind. Joseph is then thrown into prison, where he meets the butler and baker whose dreams he successfully interprets in Genesis 40.

The Potiphar’s wife motif was popular in both antiquity and the Middle Ages; it survives in eastern as well as European renditions. Recent scholarship focuses on the motif’s inversion of the most common situation of attempted rape by presenting the victim as a man, not a woman, and by giving the accusing woman the social power necessary to exact vengeance over her supposed rapist; the popularity of the motif into modernity has been found to reflect both men’s fears about the ease with which legally binding rape accusations might be formulated and their guilt about their treatment of women. But the motif is open to a broad variety of interpretations. Thus, contemporary Bible scholars argue for readings of Genesis 39 that notice the text’s depiction of Potiphar as an insufficient husband and the role that God’s providence — as opposed to Joseph’s virtue — plays in the successful resolution of the story. In the Middle Ages too the motif might invite a variety of readings. In Marie de France’s Lanval, for example, a poem that features a remarkably passive male lead, Guinevere’s propositioning of the hero is one of a series of gender inversions. In Lanval, it might be argued, the conventions of rape culture are made freshly available for analysis thanks to their cross-gendered representation.

We propose that, like Lanval, the Seven Sages invites a reflective reading of the Potiphar’s wife motif. The Seven Sages is a text that repeatedly displays the opportunistic redeployment of pre-existing tales in order to score a rhetorical point. The sages tell tales that they interpret for the emperor as warnings of the dangers of hasty action or the wiles of women, while the empress presents her stories as evidence for the unreliability of advisors and the usurping desires of princes. Neither teller captures the full potential of their stories and the same doubtful attitude that the poem cultivates towards these narrators can also be extended to the narrator of the frame. Here we follow the model advanced by Bettina Bildhauer, who argues that the rampant misogyny of the monastic Dolopathos narrator should warn readers against uncritically accepting his account of the empress’s assault on the prince. After Bildhauer, we might read the Middle English Seven Sages with its own fortified misogyny as a poem that fosters awareness of the antifeminism not only of its own frame but also of the cultures that perpetuate the Potiphar’s wife motif.

Support for this argument can be found in medieval literary theory describing the function of exempla, or short narrative examples. Writers on this topic emphasized the intellectual and emotional training that the use of fiction in moral education might facilitate; in so doing, they dwelt on the potential of individual examples to generate multiple, potentially contradictory readings, especially where they were embedded in bigger narrative contexts. The stories that the sages tell in the Seven Sages exemplify this quality insofar as several of them seem likely to engender sympathy for the women whom they depict. This is the case, for instance, of the stories featuring unhappy, cooped up wives, including puteus, the tale of the well; tentamina, the tale of the tests; and inclusa, the tale of the recluse. It is also the case that the sages’ own behavior undermines their credibility, for example in the rather ungainly competition with which the text opens in which the sages vie for the right to instruct Florentine.

The empress is similarly discredited in the occasionally odd morals that she appends to her stories. In gaza, for example, the empress objects not that the son in the tale decapitates his father in order to prevent the father’s identification as a thief but rather that the son throws his father’s head into a privy instead of choosing a more suitable place for its burial (1339–50). Our point is thus not that the collection is really a pro-woman manifesto but that all of its positive assertions are made doubtful by the fictions that its speakers engage. We view the Seven Sages as an instantiation of medieval misogyny that is polyvocal insofar as it contains within it the possibility of its own undoing.

The essential slipperiness of the collection’s tales is illustrated by the variety that characterizes their moralization, which we detail in the Explanatory Notes. In the most extreme cases, the tales told switch tellers over the course of the work’s transmission. The redactor of the H-text saw the potential of inclusa to speak for the empress and gave the tale to her, for example. Conversely, the empress gets two tales in the Seven Sages that elsewhere were told by her opponents. In the Book of Sindbad, a version of senescalcus is told by one of the sultan’s advisors; and in the Dolopathos, gaza is told by one of the wise men pleading for the prince. Table 5 shows the movement of inclusa (in bold) from the sages to the empress; it is also intended as a finding aid for readers working across the three main branches of the Seven Sages, which have the collection’s tales in different orders.

Table 5: Tales and their Tellers in Three Branches of the Seven Sages

Tales and Tellers	K	A	H
1. Empress	arbor	arbor	arbor
2. Sage	canis	canis	canis
3. Empress	senescalcus	aper	aper
4. Sage	medicus	medicus	puteus
5. Empress	aper	gaza	gaza
6. Sage	puteus	puteus	avis
7. Empress	Roma	senescalcus	sapientes
8. Sage	tentamina	tentamina	tentamina
9. Empress	gaza	Virgilius	Virgilius
10. Sage	avis	avis	medicus
11. Empress	sapientes	sapientes	senescalcus + Roma (1)
12. Sage	vidua	vidua	amatores
13. Empress	Virgilius	Roma	inclusa
14. Sage	inclusa	inclusa	vidua
15. Prince	vaticinium	vaticinium	vaticinium + amici

Notes on the Table:

• (1) The redactor of the H-text makes some substantial changes to the conclusion of the work, combining senescalcus with Roma, giving inclusa to the empress, and adding one tale not found elsewhere: amatores, in which a husband and wife conspire to defraud and murder three suitors of the wife and have the wife’s brother dispose of the bodies. The H-text also pads out its rendition of vaticinium with amici, a version of the Amis and Amiloun story. On these alterations, see the headnotes to senescalcus, Roma, inclusa, and vaticinium. On amatores and amici, see Foehr-Janssens, L’Histoire des sept sages, pp. 35–37 and 41–47.

Conclusions

The reading of the Seven Sages that we propose is diametrically opposed to that advanced by George Kane, who praised the work for its “skilful manipulation of material [. . .] so that it shall all make one single point.” For Kane, this point was that evil unchecked will triumph:

Wrong triumphs over obtuseness or complacency, and the consequences of that obtuseness or complacency are generally so final and overwhelming that they condemn it more than any formal reproof could have done. So morality is saved, and meanwhile there is opportunity for an extended display of knavery which is both praiseworthy, in view of the end which it serves, and at the same time exciting and interesting in the way that evil is — however deplorably — more exciting and interesting than good.

We commend Kane for being one of the few writers to include the Seven Sages in a survey of Middle English literature, and we appreciate his sensitivity to the work’s capacity to entertain, but we contest the idea that its morality is so straightforward and, more fundamentally, we reject the idea that the poem might be designed to make only one point.

This Introduction has focused on the psychological acuity of the Middle English Seven Sages. Here is a text which, in canis, can depict the mixed feelings that parents might have regarding their children. We have also shown the varying perspectives on women’s experiences and their representation that the poem fosters as well as the multiplicity of interpretations that its inset tales invite. Beyond these considerations, the Seven Sages taps into concerns that are at the forefront of scholarly minds in the mid 2020s. The text’s rendition of a simulated sexual assault makes it a valuable point of reference for the discussions of rape and consent in medieval contexts that have been held in the wake of pioneering archival work on the Chaucer-Chaumpaigne rape case. The broad transmission and reception history of the poem also constitutes a useful test case for proponents of a Global Middle Ages who seek to illuminate lines of contact between western Europe and the Near East. We hope that this edition will inspire a new generation of students and scholars to take up the Middle English Seven Sages of Rome with these — and many other — points in mind.