Everything about Seven Wise Masters totally explained
The Seven Wise Masters (also called
The Seven Sages or
The Seven Sages of Rome) is a cycle of stories of
Sanskrit,
Persian or
Hebrew origins.
Plot
A Rothan emperor causes his son to be educated away from the court in the seven liberal arts by seven wise masters. On his return to court his stepmother the empress seeks to seduce him. To avert some danger presaged by the stars he's bound over to a week's silence. During this time the empress accuses him to her husband, and seeks to bring about his death by seven stories which she relates to the emperor; but her narrative is each time confuted by tales of the craft of women related by the sages. Finally the prince's lips are unsealed, the truth exposed, and the wicked empress is executed.
The
frame narrative served as the flexible way to transmit tales to other listeners. The work was very popular in medieval
Europe because of its ease in facilitating the transmission of
misogynistic tales. Such stories were growing in popularity when
The Seven Wise Masters first arrived in Europe .
Origins
The cycle of stories, which appears in many European languages, is of Eastern origin. An analogous collection occurs in
Sanskrit, attributed to the
Indian
philosopher Syntipas in the first century BC, though the Indian original is unknown. Other suggestions are
Persian (in which language the earliest surviving texts are in) and
Hebrew (a culture with similar tales, such as
Joseph) origins.
Travelling from the east by way of
Arabic,
Persian,
Syriac and
Greek, it was known as the book of Sindibd, and was translated from Greek into
Latin in the
12th century by Jean de Hauteseille (Joannes de Alta Silva), a monk of the abbey of Haute-Seille near Toul, with the title of
Dolopathos (ed. Hermann Österley, Strassburg, 1873). This was translated into French about
1210 by a
trouvère named Herbers as
Li romans de Dolopathos; another French version,
Li Romans des sept sages, was based on a different Latin original. The German, English, French and Spanish
chapbooks of the cycle are generally based on a Latin original differing from these. Three metrical romances probably based on the French, and dating from the 14th century, exist in English. The most important of these is
The Sevyn Sages by
John Rolland of Dalkeith edited for the Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh, 1837).
History later:
The collection later supplied tales that circulated in both oral and written traditions.
Giovanni Boccaccio used many of them for his famous work, the
Decameron.
The Latin romance was frequently printed in the 15th century, and
Wynkyn de Worde printed an English version about 1515. See:
- Gaston Paris, Deux Rédactions du roman des sept sages de Rome (Paris, 1876, Soc. des. anc. textes fr.)
- Georg Büchner, Historia septem sapientium (Erlangen, 1889)
- Killis Campbell, A Study of the Romance of the Seven Sages with special reference to the middle English versions (Baltimore, 1898)
- Domenico Comparetti, Researches respecting the Book of Sindibdd (Folk-Lore Soc., 1882).
Sources
Irwin, Bonnie D. "The Seven Sages," in
Medieval Folkore: A Guide to Myths, Legends, Beliefs, and Customs, eds. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, & John Lindow. Oxford University Press: 2002.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Seven Wise Masters'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://seven_wise_masters.totallyexplained.com">Seven Wise Masters Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
