Though rarely treated in Anglophone scholarship, The Seven Sages of Rome was a medieval multilingual bestseller, one of the most popular narratives in premodern literature. Versions of The Seven Sages frame story and inset tales appear in almost every European language in the medieval period, variously titled The Seven Wise Masters, Historia Septem Sapientum, Roman des Sept Sages, The Book of Sindbād, Dolopathos, and Syntipas the Philosopher, among others. Part of the broad tradition of wisdom literature, or “mirror for princes”, the inset stories in The Seven Sages are designed to function as moral parables, while the premise of the frame, a storytelling contest used to adjudicate an accusation of rape, works as metatextual “proof” of the power of such narratives. In the frame story, the empress of Rome fails to seduce her stepson, the...
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Citation: Bonsall, Jane. "The Middle English Seven Sages of Rome". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 April 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=41307, accessed 13 December 2025.]
