Shades of Misogyny: Medieval Versions of the Seven Sages Tradition from a Gender Perspective

The narrative tradition of the Seven Sages, to which this special issue of Narrative Culture is devoted, originated in the East and spread all over Europe during the Middle Ages. The many versions of the tale bear witness to its enormous and long-lasting success. The story pops up in a wide variety of languages, historical periods, and social and cultural settings. The narrative exists in many forms but essentially is a frame story in which a woman falsely accuses a young prince of having tried to rape her. While the prince has vowed to remain silent for seven days, his father has to decide on his son's (and the woman's) fate. As part of the legal process, a number of embedded tales are told to influence the father in some way. The woman defends her own case, and seven wise men take up the young prince's defence. This implies that the embedded stories have an outspoken persuasive function.

The oriental versions of the narrative—handed down in diffferent languages and sources from the tenth century onward—are generally known as The Book of Sindibad. Toward the twelfth century, the tradition made its way to Western Europe. The oldest European version is the French Roman des sept sages de Rome, which was first written in verse (before the mid-twelfth century), but became more popular and influential in a prose version from around 1200 (known as version A). A number of translations and adaptations derive from this prose version, including the Latin Historia septem sapientum (version H, ca. 1330). The Latin version was extremely important for the lasting success of the narrative tradition because it gave rise to even more translations and adaptations in almost any European language.

The narrative tradition of the Seven Sages is not well known in academic circles, let alone by the larger public. Pan-European and even global and transcultural as this narrative material is, it did not fit well in national perspectives on literary history. Of course, the wealth of versions and languages involved may have discouraged scholars from diving into this international tradition. A great help is the groundbreaking work of Canadian scholar Hans R. Runte, who founded The Seven Sages Society in 1976, and published an annotated international bibliography on all aspects of the narrative tradition in 1984. Runte has updated this bibliography ever since in an free online edition.

All but one article in this special issue are based on papers that were presented in two sessions at the International Medieval Congress of Leeds in July 2018. Initially, our call for papers focused on translations and adaptations deriving from the French Roman des sept sages de Rome, but, in their presentations contributors opened the discussion to other versions of the tradition, such as the Book of Sindibad and the Latin Dolopathos by Cistercian monk Johannes de Alta Silva (ca. 1190). Their comparative analyses between sometimes remote versions often proved to be enriching.

Because the Seven Sages tradition is generally associated with misogyny, we asked contributors to give special attention to aspects of gender. Indeed, all articles address the power relations between the male and female characters in the frame story and the embedded tales. However, the relations between men and women showed much more variance and nuances than was expected. The articles herein demonstrate the considerable diffferences between the underlying gender ideologies, which are often explained as the result of adapting to a diffferent cultural, intellectual, or social context.

Bea Lundt dismisses the positivistic, structuralist and modernist approaches to this cycle of narratives and shows the opportunities that this wealth of texts, with all its versions and variants, creates for analyses from a transcultural and postcolonial perspective. More particularly, she distances herself from studies that were intent on determining and studying vulgate or common versions and pleads for analyses that consider the particularities of all textual witnesses. In her contribution, she compares Latin and German versions from diffferent centuries with the Eastern tradition. In addition to the Eastern tradition, Lundt's...