Introduction

This article compares the motivations and consequences of self-injury and suicidality in the frame narratives of the Hebrew Mishle Sendebar and the Latin Dolopathos and Historia septem sapientum. The Seven Sages of Rome as a multi-lingual tradition provides opportunities to study the intersections between gendered behaviours and theological tenets across Jewish and Christian versions (Bildhauer, Bonsall, and Nöth, 2024). That my expertise lies chiefly in Christianity, with the languages of Latin and English, reproduces both the unequal attention medieval studies has generally dedicated to Christianity as opposed to Judaism, and the violence of the ‘majority culture’ of Christianity in medieval Europe and beyond. Nonetheless, this article aims to demonstrate that a comparative reading of these texts can deconstruct key presumptions of that ‘majority culture’ (see Langmuir, 1990; Bale, 2006; Rees Jones and Watson, 2013; Krummel, 2011). The Christian perception of a merciless God in the Hebrew Bible, one who punishes, has long featured in both medieval and modern forms of antisemitism (Mroczek et al; Levine, 2021; Doherty-Harrison, 2023). This article challenges that misrepresentation by examining how Jewish and Christian versions of the Seven Sages narrative depict justice with regard to their culpable women. In such a comparative framework, the Latin versions can be characterised as arguments about the attendant dangers raised by such gendered self-injurous and suicidal behaviours, and how they must be answered by vengeance and death, while the Hebrew Mishle Sendebar instead emerges as a study of why a false accusation might be made, and how it may be followed by an ethical response, especially with regard to the accuser’s suicidality.

The presumption that self-injury will inevitably lead to, or is already a symptom of, suicidal ideation or intent has been highlighted as problematic and untrue in modern scholarship, let alone the characterisation of self-injury as a mode of deceit or manipulation (Klonsky et al, 2014). The following analyses attempt to avoid perpetuating this presumption while also acknowledging that, in all three texts, the depiction of suicidality in the prince’s accuser is portrayed to be a narrative escalation of her initial use of self-harm. Indeed, the stigmatisation of self-harm as a manipulative act is also a recognisably harmful idea, but reading texts such as these for their depiction of such manipulation also allows an examination of earlier configurations of this prejudice and its intertwinement with issues of sexual violence and religious identity.

All three texts also seem to portray self-injury in symbiosis with sexual violence. The king’s wife injures herself to simulate that she has been sexually attacked by tearing her clothes, face, and hair, but also to show her distress and raise the alarm at her (invented) violation. Self-injury in these Seven Sages texts tends to either replace speech or give it excessive power as a medium of communication and a way of establishing truth about sexual violence. Through self-injury, both speech and truth assessments become more intense, indelible, and embodied, yet they also become less clear and more ambiguous: despite the truth-claims of self-injury, its communications remain unreliable. However, this is not a problem confined to women’s use of self-injury as a source of (deceptive) power. The significance of communication and its originary loss in the prince’s lack of speech is emphasised before the accusation is made; in all three versions, the king and the broader community are devastated by his silence, and these male figures themselves express gestures of mourning in response (Epstein (ed. and trans.), 5727 – 1967: 80–1 and n. 1; Hilka (ed.), 1913: 24; Gilleland (trans.), 1981: 22; Roth (ed.), 2004: 486).¹ In other words, none of these texts entertain the possibility that the queen’s self-injury is solely for the purpose of deception. Rather, there is always something else to ask about the prince’s accuser, a communication within the wounds.

In Dolopathos, the queen, driven by her own desires, attempts to lure Lucinius out of his silence through the sensual promises of her handmaidens’ bodies, and then her own. This is perhaps more permissable than it sounds due to Dolopathos’s leadership in promoting pleasure and companionship above military victories (which he then seeks to balance out) in his kingdom (Hilka, 1913: 6; Gilleland, 1981: 7). She confesses her failure to her women in the court, ‘sicque nec illum liberaui, sed perdidi memet-ipsam’, ‘So I did not save him, but I destroyed myself’ (Hilka, 1913: 37; Gilleland, 1981: 33). This self-abnegation is further evinced in her declaration that ‘Aut enim mori michi aut potiri uoto necesse est’, ‘For I shall die if I cannot obtain my wish’, which appears more as a genuine plea for an end to suffering than a manipulative or despairing intent, given that ‘semperque repulsam se pati dolet’, ‘At each repulse she was in agony’. The ‘aut…aut’ clause is often used to communicate two irreconcilable alternatives–this construction communicates urgency and extremity, suggesting the queen is experiencing a genuine crisis rather than acting manipulatively.² In response to this, one of the women suggests she make an accusation of assault. Likely because Lucinius is not speaking at all, the power of her female companions’ speech gains a dangerous magnitude–accordingly, the queen then rips her face until it bleeds, and tears her hair and clothing. This reflects a recurring paradigm in both didactic miracle literature and the ambivalent worlds of romance: that when speech is placed in an untrustworthy mouth, it becomes excessively powerful, often as a misguided or retaliatory response to something else (see Doherty-Harrison, 2025). Self-injury here is gendered and deceptive, a source and cause of vulnerability to speech and influence, and read as a response to, and escalation of, acts of self-destruction that were already in process.

The empress’s self-injury in the Historia

The Historia constructs a more direct relationship between the deceptive act of self-harm and the initial intention of the empress—she is motivated by carnal lust as well as by jealousy of the prince Diocletian, her stepson, because she herself cannot conceive a child. However, the Historia also configures this lust-jealousy combination in highly unsettling language that seems to echo the exchanges and reverence between the lovers of the Song of Songs (Kristeva, 1987; Davis, 2006). Similarly, the empress expects the emperor’s words to align with her own sense of justice. When the emperor is persuaded by the sages to imprison his son instead of executing him on the spot, the empress refers him to the events she has constructed as a mode of arguing for the power of her own expectation:

‘Nonne constat vobis, quomodo filius vester maledictus me lacerauit? Et dixistis, quod obinde moreretur, et adhuc vivit.’ (Roth, 2004: 487)

‘Are you not certain of the way your son lacerated me, of how I am afflicted? And you said he would be executed, and yet he is alive.’

This is a contrast to the queen’s power of perception over Lucinius in the Dolopathos, where her allies argue ‘que satis per se regina tacente Lucinii facinus accusarent’, ‘these things would have been enough to accuse Lucinius of the crime even if the queen had remained silent’ (Hilka, 1913: 42; Gilleland, 1981: 37), which both activates the frequent medieval (and indeed modern) sensibility where blood functions as a ‘proof’ material (Blurton, 2023; Bildhauer, 2006), and suggests that the Historia’s empress has less signifying power in this respect than her counterpart in the Dolopathos, who is not moved to question her husband’s belief in the veracity of her self-injury in such a way.

The Historia converts the empress’s imagery and confessions of lust into language evocative of the Song of Songs, suggesting that such language—like the flesh—is vulnerable to manipulation, for which the text must punish her. Moreover, the empress actually speaks this language out loud to Diocletian as a form of entreaty, whereas the queen in Dolopathos isolates her confession to her handmaidens, her desire otherwise expressed in a form sanctioned under the pretence of enticing Lucinius to speak. The empress in the Historia leads Diocletian to a closed chamber and calls him ‘quem diligit anima mea’, ‘he whom my soul loves’, a recurring phrase in the Song of Songs (1:6; 3:1–4) (Vulgate; Douay-Rheims; all biblical quotations in Latin and English are from these versions unless otherwise stated; see also Matter, 1990; Fein, 1998; Doherty-Harrison, 2024). Direct echoes of this language (including in macaronic and vernacular texts) tended to be a way of signifying Christ, so there is also a layer of potential sacrilege embedded here to show the empress misdirecting sacred language both to her own stepson as a human and family member, but also in her attempt to use this language and reify it with her self-injurous deception. She tells him she has kept her virginity to give to him, reminiscent of the Song of Songs’s construction of reciprocality and mutual dedication, especially after various absences, partings, and returns between the lovers (‘propter te virginitatem meam custodiui, vt tu virginitatem meam haberes’, ‘for you I guarded my virginity, so you would have it’) (Roth, 2004: 486; see Kates, 2006; Davis, 2006).

Then comes a passage notable for its short sentences, as if to dramatise their following exchange as stychomythic: the empress wishes to kiss Diocletian, and he averts his face from her; she exposes her breast to him in an attempt to entice him with her body (‘Ecce, fili, quale corpus tibi prebeo’, ‘Behold, son, what kind of body I offer to you’) and he refuses to respond, ‘At iste nichil curauit’ (‘He paid no attention to that’) (Roth, 2004: 486). The empress seems damningly aware of the incestuous dimension to this relationship, addressing him as ‘fili’ and even ‘Fili dulcissime’, ‘sweetest son’. She asks Diocletian to write down an explanation for his rejection of her, attempting to use text as an alternative venue to speech through which she might influence him with this language. He turns it back on her, writing ‘Absit a me, domina, vt violem pomerium patris mei, nam contra deum peccarem et patris mei malediccionem incurrem’ (‘It is forbidden for me, mistress, as in this way I would violate the space of my father, for it is a sin against God and I would incur the wrath of my father’) (Roth, 2004: 486). He answers the empress’s syntactical intimacy of first-person and second-person verbs (‘custodiui’, ‘haberes’) with only first-person verbs (‘violem’, ‘incurrem’), asserting his independence and isolation, his refusal to think about her enough to attribute actions and deeds to her. Indeed, Diocletian makes the choice to say ‘absit’, ‘it is forbidden’, rather than ‘absis’, ‘you are forbidden’.³ To Diocletian, she is at a safe distance, nowhere near ‘diligit anima mea’ and defined only as ‘pomerium patris mei’. The word ‘pomerium’ conjures the definitiveness of a boundary wall, the hard matter of stone, while also obliquely recalling the ‘poma’ of the Song of Songs, ‘in portis nostris omnia poma’, ‘within our gates are all our fruits’ (7:13). Instead, he isolates the empress and her sensual body outside of the portis, a boundary that becomes pomerium patris mei, removing her from her own rhetoric of this biblical love song. Indeed, the empress falls into the trap she has made, invoking the devil as she makes her accusation, ‘antequam iste dyabolus opprimat me!’ ‘[come quickly] before this devil ravishes me!’, instantiating the likeness of hell in Song of Songs 8:6. When she asks the emperor ‘Nonne constat vobis’, ‘Are you not certain’ in the passage quoted above, the empress has invalidated the proof-text of her own wounds with her misuse of the Song of Songs in her earlier speech to Diocletian. Neither Song nor wound has properly worked. Her speech and her wounds reflect one another outside of her intended grasp.

The king’s maiden in the Mishle Sendebar

The Mishle Sendebar shows a radically different relationship between the accused prince and his female pursuer. She exercises no such manipulative intent through her language, and her self-injury is specified to be due to fear. It is also ambiguous whether or not she bears the same relationship with the prince and his father, Bibar, as she is not his only or formal stepmother. Bibar cries, cuts his hair, and tears his garments when he hears that his son will no longer speak, and the accuser emerges at this point:

וחבא נערה אחת מנערותיו אשר גדלה המלך עמו ויאהבה מאד מכל נשיו.

Then came a certain maiden from among his maidens, whom the King had raised and he loved her above all his women. (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 80–81)

Epstein notes that this passage closely resembles Esther 2:17, where Esther is singled out for queenship above all women–he also notes this is a commonplace phrase and does not always have to apply to Esther (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 81, n. 2, and see also 16, 32–4). While I do not wish to argue for a straightforward typology between Esther and the maiden here, it is significant that this maiden warrants the echo of the biblical language of love (וַיֶּאֱהַ֨ב, ויאהבה) in the text, which is repeated and reinforced when Bibar’s and the prince’s love for her is mentioned later. She answers Bibar’s own imitation of Mordecai in Esther 4:1 (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 81, n. 1). That the relationship between the two forms these allusions to Esther and Mordecai suggests there is a legitimate basis of Bibar’s admiration of the maiden, that they are together capable of alluding to the alliance between Esther and Mordecai. These allusions also enact a temporal reversal of Esther’s queenship and Mordecai’s rending of his garments, implying that Esther’s role with Mordecai in overturning the plot of Haman inheres in her queenship, and projects this into the interaction between Bibar and the maiden (who is not yet queen). There is thus a much more complex configuration of potentiality and loyalty in the maiden here than there possibly can be in the Dolopathos and Historia (and indeed the versions in European vernaculars that follow them; see Schlusemann, 2023), which either do not trust the accuser/queen with biblical typologies at all, or show her severely misusing them. The maiden is also not queen here, as there is no following mention of the crown in the Mishle Sendebar (כֶּֽתֶר־) that does follow in Esther 2:17.⁴ The jealous stepmother trope is therefore not present in any straightforward sense in the Hebrew version.

The maiden and the prince in the Mishle also hold communicative abilities with one another that escape the boundaries of the queen’s mistakes and the prince’s guardedness in the Latin versions. However, like the Latin queens, the maiden promises that she will make him speak; love is the reason she gives for this, either because (in some manuscript versions) Bibar loves (and trusts) her, or because the prince has loved her since childhood like family, constructing a pre-existing relationship to the family upon which hopes of the prince’s speech may rely (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 81, n. 4). Indeed, all versions have the maiden repeat the latter possibility, that the prince loved her once when both were younger,‘בנערותיך אהבתני יותר מאמך’, ‘In your youth you did love me more than your mother’ (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 82–3). The maiden then suggests they kill Bibar together, rendering the prince king and she his ‘maidservant’, ‘שפחתך’. Her intent here seems not to be to acquire queenship but to eliminate Bibar, and to serve his son. This word for servant in the Mishle Sendebar that the maiden uses about herself is also used of Hagar, who will bear a child for Sarah before the miraculous conception of Isaac (Genesis 16: 1–2).⁵ That this fantasy contains a biblical typology of fertility yet not of monarchy suggests that the maiden prioritises motherhood, and wants more than anything to bear children. This desire may be a potential source for the jealousy of the empress in some manuscripts of the Historia in particular, which hinges upon her fear of infertility (see Roth, 2004: 485; and Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 236–7, where a sage claims the empress is infertile as a way of explaining her wish to kill Bibar’s son). As in the Historia, the maiden here bares her body before the prince, and the prince covers his eyes, refusing to look at her. It is apparently only at this moment that she realises the magnitude of her actions because of the way the prince is responding to her:

ויהי כראות הנערה כי כסה הנער את עיניו לבלתי ראות ערותה, ותדע כי ברוב עורמה הוא עושה. ותירא מאר ותאמר

And when the maiden perceived that the youth had covered his eyes so that he might not behold her nakedness, then she knew that he was acting with much cunning. Then she was sorely frightened’ (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 82–5)

The maiden is frightened by the prince’s act of covering his eyes, refusing to respond to her even with his gaze. She realises that, because of her deceptive actions, he will order her killed if he speaks to the king. Communication between the two of them is enabled by this act of the prince covering his eyes. Epstein also notes that some manuscripts add that the prince is so enraged that his eyes fill with blood before he covers them (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 83, n. 1). The blood of her wounds in other versions is instead here in the prince’s eyes: the Mishle Sendebar’s accuser only rends her clothes and hair, and the text does not specify that she injures her skin beyond or as part of this (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 84-5). Their communication instead has taken place more tentatively, in the language of a shared past (that he used to love her in his youth) and, with Bibar, an echo of two courageous figures in Esther and Mordecai.

The sympathetic portrayal of the suicidal king’s maiden in the Mishle Sendebar

Self-injury is consistently depicted as a mode of proof vulnerable to deception. However, suicidal behaviour – ostensibly the successor of self-injury in these texts – is accepted more easily by all three texts as a mode of truth-telling. Truth in the context of suicidality is shown to be a form of deception more vulnerable to exposure than self-injury, and thus a less dangerous action or threat.

The Mishle Sendebar answers suicidality with forgiveness, a response absent from the Latin versions. As the inset stories progress, the maiden begins to express suicidal desire. These expressions begin after ‘Nomina’, the 17th story in the Mishle Sendebar, told by one of the sages. Its moralisation seems to articulate the fear about infertility present in her interaction with the prince before her accusation began, ‘כי בקנאה אשתך אומרת להורגו’, ‘it is only because of your wife’s jealousy that she’s asked you to kill your son’. By this time in the Mishle Sendebar, the maiden is being referred to often as the king’s wife (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 242–3), the earlier ambiguity of their relationship subsumed within the role as queen/stepmother. This is presumably to highlight the accusations of jealousy from a queenly perspective that are now overt and escalating from the sages through these moralisations, and this ambiguity may also be lost when the maiden begins to display her suicidality. The very next thing to be recounted in the narrative is that the maiden has asked her handmaids to accompany her down to the river. The sages foresee that this is so that she can commit suicide. Despite sending guards to protect her, she successfully throws herself into the river. The sages themselves rescue her. This prompts the king to again order his son’s execution (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 245). This happens again after the 20th story, ‘Fur et Luna’ (The thief and the moon), which the maiden has told herself: the story of a man afflicted by thieves who, with his wife, says a charm to incapacitate them. This is followed by Bibar’s dismissal, to which she reacts by drinking poison: ‘ותמרוך סם המות ותשת’, ‘she shaved off some poison and drank it’ (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 270–1). The Hebrew uses the word ‘[of] death’, ‘המות’ to describe the drink, so there is no ambiguity here – this is not an act of self-injury but of suicidality, an intent to die. Bibar then gives her antidote, saving her again, and accordingly orders his son to be executed. Suicide is – as in the Latin versions – demonstrated as vulnerable to weaponisation because of the way in which it can function as a death that can only be answered also by death (the death of another). That the maiden’s behaviour is disturbing would have been unambiguous (it does not fit any Jewish response to violence for which Esther was a model, about which Sam Millner has written, 2022). But her repeated anguish complicates and resists any straightforward condemnation, or even overt moralisation, in the narrative. Here, as elsewhere, the maiden also states her belief that God will be avenged upon Bibar and his sages, ‘וכן יראיני אלהים נקמה כך וביועציך הרעים’ (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 270–1, see also 186–7, 202–3, 206–7, 258–9). She demonstrates a strong command of biblical language here, using the word ‘נקמה’ for vengeance, which is also applied to Cain (Genesis 4:15, 24), the suicide of Samson (1 Samuel 18:25) and indeed in Esther 8:13, referring to the power of Jews to avenge themselves on enemies that would do them harm.⁶ As Yael Shemesh notes, Samson’s suicide is the only one in the Bible overtly motivated by revenge, in which it is both of a ‘special nature’ and thus ‘the only case in which the suicide must plan his steps carefully and conceal his intentions from those around him’ (Shemesh, 2009: 159). Yet, Shemesh writes that Samson’s suicide also harbours the possibility that ‘the overt motive of revenge was supplemented by a desire to end the hopeless life of pain, helplessness, and humiliation endured by someone who has lost his freedom and eyesight’ (Shemesh, 2009: 159). Likewise, the maiden, in her interpretation of her last story, ‘Vulpes’ (The fox), of a fox who has its body parts uncaringly cut away by passers-by, communicates an acute suffering:

גם אני באמורכם ”תמות,“ איני יכול לסבול. ועת ספרתו דברי לפני המלך, וישופטני המלך בחכמתו.

So it is with me. One says this and the other says that, but when you say, “Let her die,” I am unable to suffer any longer. And now I will plead my case before the King, and let the King judge me in his wisdom (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 292–3).

The motivation for her suicide attempt is clarified to be extreme suffering, an escalation of her original manipulative intent to something vast in its pain, and a reaction not to her original accusation or the prince himself, but to the subsequent acts of punitive storytelling undertaken by the sages. The divine vengeance she calls upon would indicate a conviction belied by her suicidality; rhetoric and action are mismatched in a mode constitutive of conflicting guilt from the original error and a suffering that risks outpacing it. This seems to be a deeply empathic portrayal of a young woman who made a mistake.

Rather than the Historia’s clear suggestion that the empress misuses biblical language, the Mishle Sendebar allows the maiden accuser’s suicidality to co-exist with a high level of theological literacy, and the possibility that she is deserving of compassion (but which is not necessarily conditional upon this literacy). Although one of the sages adapts a maxim that women are both more unstable and cunning than men, but lesser in their knowledge (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 219, n. 1), the maiden pushes back by repeatedly citing scriptural sources for her stories and moralisations (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 229, n. 1). In ‘Fur et Luna’, a story that – in addition to her own moralisation of vengeance—clearly seeks to communicate that women and wives make trustworthy secret-keepers and allies, the maiden also alludes to the rare word in the Hebrew Bible that usually signifies the feminine beloved, the Shulamite (variant English versions include Sulamite, Sulamitess, Shunamitess) in the charm that the husband shares to oust the thieves, ‘אולם שולם סולם’, ‘ulam, shulam, sulam’ (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 266–7). Sulam is the village from which David’s Abishag and the mother of the son revived by Elisha come (see Auerbach, 1953); the ‘Shulamite’ is attested only in the Song of Songs (Stern, 2004),⁷ and refers to the bride (6:13). The maiden thus weaves in this language of beloveds into her story about trust between a married pair. In ‘Absalom Rebellus’ (Absalom the insurgent), she prefaces the tale with ‘ותצא ותבא ראייה מתורת היהודים’, ‘I will bring you an example from the Torah of the Jews’ (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 228–9), and tells the story of King David’s son Amnon, who revolted against his father and raped his sister Tamar in II Samuel 13–15 (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 229, n. 3), suggesting it as a parallel for her own situation:

ולא אביו ראה כל הצרות שראה אל בשביל שלא עצבו ונשאו לכו לעשות נבלה עם תמר. ואם היה הורגו על הפשע ההוא, לא בא לדוד כל הצרות שבאו לו על ידו ועל יועציו הרעים.

And his father would not have seen all the misfortune he was to suffer except that he did not wish to vex him. But because his father never vexed him by saying to him, ‘Why do you act so?’ therefore, his heart urged him to do this wanton deed with Tamar his sister (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 230–1).

Again, the maiden not only demonstrates a moralising capacity from her own biblical knowledge, but she uses the same word ‘נְבָלָה’, ‘nebalah’ (disgraceful deed), as is common not only to II Samuel 13:12 – to Tamar’s plea to Amnon not to enact the violence upon her – but also to the penitential address of Isaiah and Jeremiah (Isaiah 32:6; Jeremiah 29:23) which refer to speaking against God and to acts adjacent to adultery respectively.⁸ The maiden thus not only presents a powerful biblical argument against sexual violence but also draws in these related crimes, in addition to that of incest between Tamar and Amnon, to deepen her accusation. Though the sage is outraged by what he suggests is her manipulative misreading of Amnon—and, indeed, that she dares even to refer to David—he has been so unsettled by her demonstration of biblical moralisation that he feels the need to construct his own to answer it, deploying a range of Midrashic ideas and cross-references which are otherwise rare in the Mishle Sendebar (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 232–5, 235, n. 4, and 35–6).

The maiden’s argument that David ought to have killed Amnon to spare the suffering that resulted from his continuing to live also aligns with her own argument that she can no longer bear to live because such discourse as constitutes the narrative has caused her to suffer. Again, this suggests that the author intended for this to be read sympathetically, however much it may also enforce or support the sage’s own maxim of women’s knowledge as lesser, manipulative, or vulnerable to theological misunderstanding. The whole kingdom, led by the prince himself, chooses to forgive her, instead of enacting vengeance:

ויען בן המלך: ”אין עליה משפט מות, כי כל האדם ילחם להציל נפשו. ועתה אשאל מאת המלך ויועציו למחול העון לה, ולבלתי המיתה“.

ושמחו המלך והשרים אשר אתר וכל העם למחול לה העון.

And the Prince replied: “Let her not be condemned to die, for every man fights for his life. And now I will ask of the King and his counselors to pardon her sin, and not to execute her.”

And the King and the officers that were with him, and the whole nation, were happy to forgive her her sin (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 294–5).

Epstein notes that the Greek Syntipas (late 11th century) continues her punishment through wandering and constant proclamation of her crimes by two attendants, and the Syriac Sindban (10th century) and Spanish Libro (13th century) depict her execution, in contrast to the Mishle Sendebar’s use of the Golden Rule to portray pardon and forgiveness (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 295, n. 2; 5, 19–20). The Golden Rule of the Talmud is shown to govern the responses of the prince, the sage Sendebar, and the entire kingdom following him, to the maiden’s actions, as Sendebar speaks the following when asked what reward he wishes for:⁹

לא חסרתי דבר. אלא שאלתי ובקשתי דעלך שנא, לחברך לא תעביד, ואהבת לריעך כמוך.

I lack nothing. However, my petition and my request is that what is hateful unto you do not do to your neighbor, and love your neighbor as yourself (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 296–7, and n. 3; Holtz, 1984).

The prince understands the maiden’s suicidality compassionately, as an irrational desire brought on by intolerable suffering – a suffering which, paradoxically, could also be interpreted as proof of the value the maiden places on her life, such that it becomes unbearable in its disruption (see Hornby, 2005; Gardner, 1999; Alvarez, 1971) –thus meriting forgiveness. This attitude is encapsulated by Sendebar through the response of the Golden Rule, kept as Epstein notes in the Jewish (negative) formulation, not the Christian, positive language (Matt. 22:40) (Epstein, 5727 – 1967: 297, n. 3; see also Steiner, 2003). The entire narrative becomes a study not of answering a false accusation of sexual violence with vengeance and death but instead of the reasons why one might be made and how it ought to be treated. Even as the sages contest her, the maiden’s display of biblical learning shifts the focus: accusations and suffering cannot be easily detached from the potentialities of her knowledge, and the narrative ultimately insists on compassion and forgiveness. This is strikingly different from the Latin versions, especially the Historia. While the text is careful not to imply that the maiden is deserving of the application of the Golden Rule because she demonstrates this degree of biblical learning, it also functions as evidence of the text’s interest in the maiden beyond her manipulative actions, which may contribute to a more general interest in mitigation, understanding, and holistic consideration of this figure wholly absent in the Dolopathos and Historia.

Vengeance upon the suicidal queen in the Dolopathos

The Dolopathos depicts and justifies vengeance instead of forgiveness as the appropriate treatment for the female accuser. This concurs with the queen and her retinues’ own constant demand for vengeance against the alleged perpetrator. In the Dolopathos, the failure of the blood-as-proof method is directly used as a justification of vengeance on Lucinius, from the allies of the queen: ‘nolle tamen iniuriam filie sue manere inultam, presertim cum rex insidias suspicari uideatur nec credat uestibus uultibusque laceratis nec cruori mananti’, ‘They demanded that her insult be avenged, especially when the king seemed to suspect treachery and not to trust her clothes, and wounded face, and flowing blood’ (Hilka, 1913: 42; Gilleland, 1981: 37). However, this response bears an interesting relationship with Dolopathos’s utterance to Lucinius, ‘Fili, ait, si numquam fuisses natus, numquam me tua letificasset natiuitas’, ‘I wish you had never been born. I wish your birth had never made me so happy’ (Hilka, 1913: 41–2; Gilleland, 1981: 37). This utterance closely mirrors the idea in Matthew 26:24 that Judas should never have been born; given the villified characterisation of Judas in the Middle Ages, both because of his betrayal of Christ and his subsequent response by committing the (Christian) sin of ‘despair’ in his suicide, it is plausible that such a sentiment of non-birth is being purposely invoked in Dolopathos here (Baum, 1916; Cane, 2005; Watson, 2010).

Dolopathos does not betray any suspicion of the queen’s injuries in his words, other than that he asks his son to speak back to him, to offer answers. Therefore, this seemingly Judas-like ‘numquam me tua letificasset natiuitas’ is actually rendered by Dolopathos as a form of caring address, hoping to jolt Lucinius out of his silence by implying it is disturbing the nature of his parental love. This caring address, using the language of non-birth which is thus adjacent to suicidality in the context of Matt. 26:24, is in turn implied to disrupt the belief in the blood of injury as proof and truth. This is despite (or, indeed, because) suicidality is presumed to follow the blood of self-injury, the blood-proof directed inward. It is precisely the believability of the queen that elicits these bewildered petitions from Dolopathos, yet the queen’s allies react to mistrust by demanding vengeance on Lucinius. Again, self-injury has disrupted communication channels in an unpredictable manner, to which the queen’s call for vengeance is responding. Vengeance promises to restore such communication, to restore ‘order’, though importantly not to resolve any competing demands as to whose order is more deserving of restoration. In response to self-injury itself—the disrupting force—suicidality is shown to function as a way of apportioning blame; this and its answering vengeance are demonstrated to form a reinforcing, vicious loop.

It is this apparent disjuncture between the shared belief in blood as proof and the suspicion read into Dolopathos’s bewildered rage that generates the recursions to law that dominate the later stages of the narrative between the inset stories (Hilka, 1913: 78–9; Gilleland, 1981: 69). Law will emancipate Dolopathos, he seems to believe, from the burden of executing his son according to the demands of the queen’s blood. But the law consistently returns vengeance, and so Lucinius is brought progressively closer to being burned alive in the intervals between each inset story. However, this link between law and vengeance is revealed to be symptomatic of the text’s conversionary project, as Lucinius converts to Christianity after the death of the queen (see Birenbaum, 2009). Successful vengeance restores the ‘order’ of Christianisation: for the pagan law to be read correctly, it has to be accompanied by the conversion of the one whom such correctness benefits.¹⁰ In other contexts this legal paradigm has many valences of anti-Judaism, as Christianity claims the ‘correct’ reading of the Hebrew Bible (Cohen, 1999).

Indeed, the mysterious Christian teacher who converts Lucinius refers to supersessionist interpretation directly (Hilka, 1913: 99; Gilleland, 1981: 87), and Lucinius describes himself (with some ambiguity regarding the degree of self-awareness with which this is intended to be read) in reference to Pauline models of enlightened understanding and a past of misunderstanding: ‘Magna certe et omni ueneratione digna sunt que dicis, sed tenebre quedam crasse cordis mei obducte oculis lumen ueritatis me plenius intueri non sinunt,’ ‘What you say is important and worthy of respect, but thick shadows cover my heart and do not permit me to see clearly the light of truth’ (Hilka, 1913: 106; Gilleland, 1981: 94). In a medieval context this would have been apparent as a reference to the veiled and unveiled Synagoga, converting out of her ‘blindness’ to Christianity at the end of time (Cohen, 2004). The Dolopathos, therefore, supports the queen’s execution by vindicating Lucinius as a ‘righteous pagan’. Indeed, he is taught during this exchange that mercy is never given to those who do not ask (Hilka, 1913: 101; Gilleland, 1981: 90), while consigning to a Jewish or pagan past the legal system which would demand the ‘wrong’ sort of vengeance in failing to distinguish truth under the proof-text of blood. Ironically, blood as proof is a prevalent characteristic of medieval antisemitic mythmaking (Blurton, 2023). Is this ending of the Dolopathos, then, a kind of deflection of anxiety about which elements of the supersession allow vengeance to become reliable, if they can indeed do so at all?

Vengeance upon the empress in the Historia

The Historia is less interested in upholding the law in the emperor’s kingdom than it is in demonstrating its pliability: at the beginning of the text, the law works in the empress’s favour, but by the end, the emperor tells her she is at the law’s own mercy (Roth, 2004: 487, 527). The law in this context, the Historia seems to argue, can be trusted to arbitrate the levying of vengeance, conflated as it is with the supersessionist Christian concept of misericordia (see Doherty-Harrison, 2023; Birenbaum, 2009; Coolidge, 1977). Instead of communication itself being rendered slippery by the nature of self-injury as in the Dolopathos, the robustness of the law is upheld by the emperor’s alternating use of it between what he believes to be true, followed by what he knows as the truth by the end of the text. There is no sign of the pagan world from which Lucinius converts in the Historia: Diocletian, indeed, is clothed in purple robes like Christ (John 19:5; Luke 23:11) which the audience is clearly supposed to recognise to be emblematic of his righteousness (Roth, 2004: 527). In turn, this Diocletian-Christ typology also constructs or reinforces the argument of Joseph as prefiguration of Christ through his imprisonment after the accusation of Potiphar’s wife (see, for instance, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Bible moralisée, 1220–1230, f. 10r).

However, the use of language of suffering and mercy from the crucifixion and the Psalms is demonstrated to be likewise vulnerable to co-option by the Historia’s deceptive women, which could suggest either a direct influence or a broader shared theological anxiety regarding the application of scriptural knowledge between the Mishle Sendebar and the Historia. In ‘Puteus’ (The well), the wife uses penitential language when begging to be let back in: ‘Amore illius, qui pro nobis pependit in cruce, miserere mei et permittite me intrare!’ ‘For love of him who for us hung on the cross, have mercy on me and allow me to enter’ (Roth, 2004: 496). The wife blends a reference to the bride’s chamber in the Song of Songs 5:2–7, a biblical source used by Christians as an archetype for Christ’s love of the human soul and the personification of the Church, Ecclesia, with the ‘miserere mei’ plea of Psalm 50 and the imagery of Christ’s suffering body on the cross (see also Roth, 2004: 507–8). She constructs a deeply Christological – and thus, perhaps, dangerously persuasive – request to her husband to be let back in; by allowing her to enter, he would re-enact the virtue that alleviates Christ’s pain, reaffirm his sacrifice, be in the position of God. Of course, this is also dangerous – for example, Derek Pearsall has written on the problem of a male lover acting like God, as Walter does in ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ (Pearsall, 1985). Thus, the method with which this wife pleads with her husband to show mercy can indeed be read to use Christological exegesis as a way of disguising temptation to marital (and thus gendered, politicised) power.

The wife also demonstrates a high degree of theological learning when she meets her husband’s angered wish that she had drowned before they met with a threat of her own suicide: ‘Domine, ex quo ita est, me submergere volo. Et ante testamentum concedo: Animam lego deo et beate virgini, corpus ad sepeliendum in ecclesia beati Petri,’ ‘Lord, so out of that [wish] it is, I want to drown myself. And before this testament I concede: I entrust my soul with God and the blessed Virgin, my body to be buried in the church of blessed Peter’ (Roth, 2004: 496). Wishing that she had died reflects the abortive wistfulness of Matthew 26:24 about Judas, that he should not have been born. That he was born then results in the archetypal suicide, the originary loss of Christ’s mercy (Robson 2001; Murray 2000; 1998). Suicide as the worst sin, as a turn away from God, is leveraged by the wife as a form of emotional blackmail, or trying the bluff of her angered husband: if you wish I had never been in your life, she seems to argue, so will you now take responsibility for my utmost peril in dying out of it. She deepens his guilt with her wish for a consecrated burial, which would not be possible in the Middle Ages as the result of a suicide (that was not prompted by illness or ‘madness’, as this one appears not to be) (Murray, 1998; 2001). In a single story, an adulterous wife is demonstrated to manipulate her husband with an outstanding command of Christological language and law.

In response to these examples of wifely deception, the Historia seems to attribute the experience of truth-telling through sexual violence exclusively to the accused male character Diocletian, through his use of the ‘phylomena’, nightingale (Roth, 2004: 528). This seems to reference the well-known Ovidian story of Philomel, who turned into a nightingale after being raped and mutilated by Tereus. Accordingly in the Historia the nightingale is then given truth-telling power claimed in Christian texts about Ecclesia, the mother Church, in a masculinised frame whereby such truth belongs to Diocletian: ‘Et sic in mensa, id est in ecclesia, dulciter cantat phylomena, id est predicator, qui dulciter pronuncciat verbum dei’, ‘And thus it was measured, as it is in Ecclesia, sweetly sings the nightingale, it is to be proclaimed, who sweetly pronounces the word of God’ (Roth, 2004: 529). In the Historia, this is a device to circumvent the danger of self-harm and suicidality by claiming (perhaps even appropriating) the truth-telling martyrdom of their antecedent sexual violence instead as male righteousness.

As truth becomes re-attached to the survival of sexual violence through the story of the falsely accused male, Diocletian, so then does the text suggest that the wifely figure of Ecclesia replace the stepmother figure of the empress, a paradigm often repeated elsewhere as the replacement of Synagoga or Eve as the stepmother by Ecclesia or the Virgin Mary as true mother (Roth, 2004: 509). This replacement is also present in ‘Tentamina’, where the mother advising her daughter to commit the acts which result in her being destructively bloodlet is also superseded by Ecclesia in the Moralitas at the end of the text: ‘Et sic cadis in lectum dampnacionis, et si inclamas matrem, id est ecclesiam, dicet tibi: >Prius dixi tibi: Quare malum non dimisisti?<’, ‘And as you fall into chosen damnation, and if you cry out to your mother, who is Ecclesia, she will say to you: “Before I said to you: how did you not send the wickedness away?”’ (Roth, 2004: 509). These examples show Ecclesia behaving vengefully, which—as I hope to have shown—is a behaviour entirely absent in the Hebrew Mishle Sendebar, where the maiden is forgiven via the Golden Rule.

Conclusion

This article has highlighted the Mishle, Historia and Dolopathos as a range of medieval responses to sexual violence and the search for truth it demands, including vivid discussions of the role of self-injury and its complex, and often idiosyncratic, relationships with suicidality. These truth-claims, together with medieval Christian ideas about the substance of blood and the related claims on the feminised body as expressive of temporality, history and supersessionist interpretation (Lampert, 2004; Dinshaw, 1989), are inevitably entangled with the constructs of antisemitism. Comparative literary analysis can enable deconstruction of such stigmatisation where versions of the same narrative or tradition can be found in both Jewish and Christian contexts or languages, such as the Seven Sages of Rome. Such comparative work is usual in, for example, biblical scholarship and examinations of commentary traditions (Hawkins and Stahlberg, 2006; Boyarin, 1994; Klepper, 2010), but there is more to do for medieval literature with this approach. The Seven Sages is also a remarkable tradition for its construction and perpetuation of transphobia; similarly, this is a recognisably modern form of discrimination which has also been linked to antisemitism (Montgomerie, Peterson, and Stein, 2021). My hope is that this article may encourage further work on the histories of self-harm and its representations in literary cultures, along with its genderedness and intersections with religious polemic, to more precisely locate the anxieties it produces and where these anxieties may be challenged.

Acknowledgments

This article owes its existence to the support and encouragement of Bettina Bildhauer and Jane Bonsall, and their generative research community for the project The Seven Sages of Rome: editing and reappraising a forgotten classic from global and gendered perspectives, funded by the AHRC and DFG, 2023–2026. I am grateful to them and to the other members of our writing sub-group, Jordan K. Skinner, Yasmina Foehr-Janssens, and Moss Pepe, for their formative feedback on parts of the piece, and to Hannah Piercy who also gave helpful comments on a later draft. Conversations with Rosalie Gabay Bernheim enriched my understanding of the theological backgrounds to this piece. My immense thanks to the two anonymous readers for their attentive and incisive reports. This article was researched and written during an Early Career Fellowship from The Leverhulme Trust held at the University of Edinburgh.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.