The inception of The Seven Sages of Scotland

The Seven Sages of Scotland emerged from the organisers’ shared interest in both the Seven Sages and in storytelling. The medieval Scots version of the text, with its unique features and unusual narrative structure, offered a striking piece of source material for artists working in contemporary Scots dialects. The commissioned Scots adaptation might therefore be seen as a trans-temporal creative bridge between the distinctive literary past and present of the Scots language – a key goal of the project. Given the violence and discrimination at the heart of the narrative, the project brief for the performers required careful framing. The two adaptation workshops run by Black were part of a larger study day in which Flynn, Bonsall and Bettina Bildhauer – an expert in the study of the Seven Sages tradition – led a roundtable giving the makers and academics present historical overviews of the multiple versions of Seven Sages texts; the history of the medieval Scots version; and an introduction to the critical context of the texts, particularly feminist approaches to the texts, which was supported by Seven Sages scholars present in the room (Foehr-Janssens, 2020; Bildhauer, 2020). This aimed both to contextualise the elements of the Scots Sages narratives which read as misogynist, racist or discriminatory today and demonstrate how several versions of the Seven Sages lend themselves to more complex readings which seem to push back against or critique the apparently monolithic misogyny of the frame narrative. For example, Cynthia Ho, Mohsen Zakeri, and Yasmina Foehr-Janssens have all noted that the Western versions of the Seven Sages express a more sustained and virulent misogynist message than earliest Eastern versions (Zakeri, 2023; Foehr-Janssens, 2020: 171; Ho, 1992: 99–100). Meanwhile, Bildhauer notes of the German version that, while the frame narrative seems to always teach men not to believe the words of women, the authority of the implied narrator is undermined by the fact that ‘the prologue also makes explicit that the narrator is biased due to having a clear didactic intent: to warn against women and against bad advice. This suggests that his tale should be interpreted as one-sided as part of an attempt to show women and bad advisers in a negative light’ (Bildhauer, 2023: 144). One intention for this performance was to reproduce artistically some of the methods already identified in feminist critiques of the Seven Sages. Viewing the misogyny of the Scots text as part of a cultural adaptation choice made by the Western tradition of writers opened the possibility for our modern adaptors to consider their own choices and priorities in approaching the tales.

To explore these creative choices, the workshop embarked on a reflection of the politics, impact, and established critical framework for adaptive approaches more broadly. Critical to theorising adaptation processes is understanding the relationship between the adapted work and the original text. The stance an adapted work takes relative to its source might vary depending on its goal and attitude, with impact on perceived fidelity, affective mode, and style. Sometimes the goal of adaptation is primarily to make original texts accessible or to extend, honour, or draw inspiration from a specific source text. Alternatively, and particularly in the case of source texts with problematic thematic material, sometimes the goal of an adapted work is to critique or undermine the textual goals of the source text; a ‘re-vision’, ‘appropriation’, or ‘hijacking’ rather than an ‘homage’ (Poole, 2004: 2; Sanders, 2006: 3). In the reception of many popular adapted works, which may include the translation of a text from page to screen, the transposition of a story from a previous era to a contemporary setting, or the extension of a text through additional or sequential narratives, the idea of ‘fidelity’ or ‘authenticity’ – the proximity of an adapted work to the ‘core meanings or values’ of its source material – is key (Whelehan, 1999: 3). For example, when a ‘work of great literature’ moves from page to screen, close comparison between the two often focuses on perceived fidelity over other artistic concerns, stemming from what Imelda Whelehan terms ‘an almost unconscious prioritizing of the fictional origin’ over the adaptive work as a distinct piece (Whelehan, 1999: 3). As Speer and others have noted, the prioritising of versions of the Seven Sages based on their perceived fidelity to an (imagined) source text has also been a key feature of scholarship on these texts – sometimes in ways which fail to take into account the way in which ‘tale tellers – especially literary ones – might deliberately alter a familiar story to suit their own purposes’ (Speer, 1996: 129).

These questions are not only relevant to modern practices of adaptation but, as Lundt (2000), Speer (1996) and this issue’s articles show, are an integral part of the history of the Seven Sages transmission itself. These studies also demonstrate the ways in which adaptation practices are political. In the adaptation of classic works of literature, for example, the modern push for diverse casting, the inclusion of people of colour, or the revision of narratives to grant women or minorities greater agency may be seen as at odds with the ‘core values’ or historical realities of the original (Rogers, 2013; Lynn, 2024; Prescott, 2021). Given medieval narratives are not universally well-known, an audience’s attention to the ‘authenticity’ of their adaptation may be less pronounced, but the question is no less fraught. As this article argues, medievalists interested in adaptation wrestle with how much, and what kind of, fidelity to strive for in, while recognising that often – as Julie Sanders observes – it is ‘at the point of infidelity that the most creative acts of adaptation and appropriation take place’ (Sanders, 2006: 20). As a narrative moves from one medium or one iteration to the next, the space between source and adaptation becomes generative for both adaptor and critic to think through the distinct goals and impacts of the original and adapted works.

There is an affective component to this as well. Adaptive works assume elements of emotional proximity or distance relative to their source, depending on their framing, sometimes resulting in affective retellings the original author could not have imagined or intended. Audiences too may form their own individual emotional connections with the material beyond those anticipated or encouraged by the performer. This was borne out in our performances; several of the artists involved with the project expressed more emotional affinity for, or ease with, the empress’s side of the storytelling contest, with Dorothy Lawrenson (2025b) explaining that this meant her story therefore did not have a ‘women are immoral and can’t be trusted’ moral. This modern affinity diverged from that of the medieval versions of the text, which – on the surface, at least – assume the empress is lying and fashion her as the antagonist, often by giving her stories which do not entirely work with her position in order to discredit her (Speer, 1996). Additionally, these observations reflected the way the structure of the frame narrative necessarily impacted the performers’ feelings about individual embedded stories, even when those stories – like ‘Virgilius’ (Virgil), the tale Lawrenson adapted – are oblique in their internal expression of allegiance to empress or sages (Bildhauer, 2023). The political project of an adaptive work whose structure generates ‘side taking’ in the way The Seven Sages does often hangs on this question of affect or sympathy. With whom do we empathise? Who do we trust, root for and believe? Intentionally generating and deploying audience emotion, therefore, is part of the process of responsibly adapting medieval material. In the case of the Seven Sages, the text’s affective potential is a large part of why we felt it is so suited for contemporary adaptation. This is an emotive text designed to engender emotional responses from its audiences. The affective impact it has on modern audiences, whose responses to the narrative frequently do not align with the moralising project of the sages and, we may presume, medieval authors and translators, has the dual effect of creating both emotional connection and distance from the source material.

Determining how The Seven Sages of Scotland would relate to The Buke of the Sevyne Sagis meant navigating these various adaptive, affective dynamics, and balancing the different desires and goals of the organisers and performers. As medievalists, we hoped to give audiences an opportunity to connect with the medieval past, identify points of resonance between medieval and modern concerns and learn more about premodern Scots literary themes and topoi. As feminists, we were determined not to uncritically replicate the sexist, discriminatory, transphobic dynamics of the original text. The questions collectively asked by Flynn, Bonsall, Black, and the performers at the workshops about the goals of the piece reflected these distinct aims. We asked: would this be a straight re-telling, or a revision? An ‘authentic’ adaptation, or a hostile takeover? An homage or a hijacking?

Practical strategies for performing medieval texts

To allow the artists to explore these questions, Black was employed to run workshops (St Andrews, May 2023; September 2024) which introduced the project’s artists and academics to practices of subversive adaptation. These provided a set of practical tools, some of which are shared below, to help the artists tell the stories in a way which might apply pressure against the misogynist or confusing grain of their original structures. It aimed to provide a space for the artists to play with different techniques, think about their own performance and narrative styles, and explore their own apprehensions about adapting medieval texts for modern audiences. The workshop was organised around the series of responsibilities we hold as medieval storytellers and creative adaptors, and this section follows the same structure. The idea of relationships (and their attendant responsibilities) is well established in the performance storytelling community. Storyteller Clare Murphy explains: ‘There’s your relationship to the audience; there’s your relationship to your story; and your relationship to yourself. And all of these things are very present. And… will manifest on stage’ (Murphy, cited in Harrop, 2023: 40). However, working with medieval texts involves additional responsibilities. Black’s workshop characterised these as a responsibility to the original medieval text and to our audience; a responsibility to the medievalist scholarship; and a responsibility to the marginalised groups (under-)represented in the texts. While examples from all these categories are discussed in this chapter, given the feminist praxis of the Seven Sages project, the final category has the most emphasis.

The activities were conducted in groups, with each group given a story to work on. The workshop deliberately assigned the more challenging, misogynist or outlandish stories from The Buke of the Sevyne Sagis, including the rape accusation frame narrative; ‘Canis’ (the dog), the faithful hound slain by his master; ‘Gaza’ (the treasure), the story of the thieving knight whose son decapitates him; ‘Puteus’ (the well), the woman who tricks her husband into thinking she has fallen into a well; ‘Tentamina’ (the test), the lady whose blood was let; and ‘Avis’ (the bird), the magpie who reports a wife’s infidelity (van Buuren, 1982: 237–302). Summaries of these stories may be found on the Seven Sages of Rome Database (Bildhauer, Bonsall and Nöth, 2024). Towards the end of the workshop, individuals paired with a person from another group, and each told a fragment of their story where they felt the exercises had produced something interesting. We discussed how they had chosen to deal with this material, what they had learnt through the process of adaptation, and where they might apply some of these techniques.

Acting as a Bridge: Responsibility to our Audience and to the Original Text

Our work as public medievalists and storytellers is fundamentally about acting as a bridge between medieval sources and audiences who might not have had the skills, access or opportunities to encounter those texts themselves. In a public engagement project like The Seven Sages of Scotland, it was therefore important that audiences leave the performance with a good understanding of the shape of these stories. Then, if audience members who came to the performance wished to explore the original texts, they would not find something so completely different it alienates them. In performance storytelling or poetry, authority is first visible on stage in the form of the teller, but that teller is also collaborating with and often explicitly acknowledging previous authorities: in this case, the Old Scots text. The workshop’s opening discussions therefore centred on the qualities and knowledge audience members might bring to the performance and on the qualities of the texts we hoped to share with them. This included the questions:

1. Who is our audience?

2. What might they already know?

3. What do they need to know to understand this story?

4. What might be confusing, triggering or difficult for them?

Due to the venues, advertising, and material, neither performance would have a typical general audience. The first performance was held at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, so regarding question one, it was fair to assume the audience would have a good knowledge of the conventions of performance storytelling, folklore traditions, Scots language, and spoken word. The venue for the second performance, the Byre Theatre in St Andrews, regularly hosts events with the University community and the School of Modern Languages, and draws audiences interested in global literatures, oral tradition, and literary performance, though perhaps less familiar with medieval and folk-narratives. In answer to the second question, this meant that the audiences’ prior knowledge might be atypical, and that they might require a little less contextualisation than a general audience. Regular storytelling audiences may also be familiar with some of the Seven Sages stories, as certain tales, like the stories of the well and the dog slain by his master appear in wider storytelling repertoires beyond the Seven Sages (Marzolph, 2020).

A major potential point of confusion for this audience was language, which would prove a barrier and a point of creative play, both for the project’s public audiences and the artists adapting this Older Scots material into contemporary Scots. This was shown particularly in the varied use of modern Scots dialects employed by the performers in the final performances. Scots, one of Scotland’s three official languages spoken by 1.5 million people, was only relatively recently recognised as an official national language, and is highly regionally varied (National Records of Scotland, 2011). Our performers identified themselves as using Orkney Scots, and ‘a mixture of Doric and other Scots’ from Aberdeen and the lowlands, and other varieties (Gibb, 2024). Some said they had grown up without much exposure to formal Scots and had integrated it into their artistic practice intentionally, while others said that as native speakers, it was ‘whatever comes naturally’ (Lawrenson, 2024). Even artists regularly working in the language reported having to overcome internalised barriers to its use, and/or to claiming the language as ‘theirs’. One performer, Harry Josephine Giles, described Scots as ‘a language that I’m constantly trying to return to – because in this Anglophone world we don’t have that much opportunity to keep working and living in your language’ (Giles, 2024). The Seven Sages of Scotland offered such a return, and several contributors reported that working in Scots for the project was one of its ‘great pleasures’ (Smith, 2025). The Older Scots of the original Buke therefore served as both a (welcome) challenge and an inspiration for the adaptors.

The workshop then explored the question of how much to preserve of the original text, and how much to change. Workshop participants (both academics and adaptors) discussed the necessity of balancing some level of ‘authenticity’ with the transmission of meaning. Central to this discussion were concerns about adapting medieval cultural elements which ran counter to the values of modern audiences, not to mention the tellers themselves. Misogyny was a major element of this, being both a part of the frame narrative and many of its contributing stories. Even stories which show women as decisive or clever (such as ‘Inclusa’ (the imprisoned wife), or ‘Avis’) are framed by the medieval Scots text to pander to misogynist stereotypes in which women are cunning, untrustworthy, or driven more by sexual desire than logic. We discussed the sexual politics of The Seven Sages, noting the repeated pattern of unhappy marriages, the youth and vulnerability of both the empress and her stepson, and the fact that elements of medieval cultural and literary norms – such as a husband’s disciplining his wife – register very differently for modern audiences than they would have done originally. We also identified the problem of the ‘morals’ appended to each of these stories, often designed to reinforce misogyny, but sometimes at the expense of the sense of the tale itself, as feminist scholarship has observed (Ho, 1992: 100–101). The groups therefore discussed,

How far does the moral fit the story?

And, in cases where it did not,

How might we deliver the moral in performance to reflect this mismatch?

The possibilities of this were explored by an exercise on tone. Participants were encouraged to tell one minute of their story, first, as though it was highly dramatic, then, as though it was a casual conversation, and finally, somewhat sceptically. We identified where a mismatch between a moral and its story might be supported and accentuated between a change in register.

Some artists put this into practice in their performance. In her rendition of ‘Canis’, the story of the faithful dog unjustly killed, Shona Cowie linked changes in verbal tone and register to changes in movement and physical placement on the stage to communicate the affective complexity of the narrative. The difficulty of reaching a satisfying or clear-cut ‘moral’ from ‘Canis’ is something all iterations of this story – the most widely shared across the tradition – have in common (Marzolph, 2020; Steel, 2012). After an energetic, almost acrobatic and comic-tragic portrayal of the faithful hound’s fight with the serpent, then a deeply poignant meditation on the knight’s regret upon learning that he has slain his dog in error (heeding the cries of his wife, who believed the blood on the dog’s muzzle was their baby’s), Cowie paused, then took a large step into another space on the stage. Shifting from movement and emotion to physical stiffness and a dry, emotionless delivery, Cowie’s explication of the moral – never trust a woman’s words – felt sharply disjointed from the rest of her performance. This disjuncture was comedic, but also effective in drawing attention to the (mis)use of the narrative by the sage/narrator/redactor as part of the Scottish Seven Sages’s misogynist project (Flynn, 2023). The audience, experiencing a kind of emotional whiplash from laughter (the fight), to near tears (the dead dog), to an uncertain mix of feelings (the moral), came away with a sense of the oddness of medieval narrative structures, and scepticism concerning particular goals of The Seven Sages as a text. Cowie’s performance and the audience response therefore illustrated the kinds of argument widely made in Seven Sages scholarship: that the link between story and the moralised interpretation of it in the frame narrative is often tenuous at best, and exposes the fragility of structures which use biased storytelling to establish ‘truth’ (Foehr-Janssens, 2020).

In addition to misogyny, there were other values present in the original text which were also likely to generate a significantly different reaction in a modern audience than they might have originally and needed additional contextualisation to serve their narrative function. This is often the case for the reception of medieval material; modern audiences come equipped with cultural expectations that result in different responses to material like the suggestion of culpability in illness (i.e., that a leper’s ‘innate wickedness’ might have caused their disease), or appetite for comedy centred around power imbalances (wives outwitting husbands, servants outwitting masters). The aspiration to move out of your sphere (social climbing, or seeking a marriage above one’s station) is often harshly punished in medieval tales, which are typically fundamentally conservative (Sidhu, 2016). This works against modern concerns for equality, ‘inclusivity and respect’, and means the tales do not always generate the intended emotional effect: modern audiences sometimes struggle to be on the side of a medieval trickster, sympathising instead with the victims of a trick (Lister, 2023: 198). This leads us to the medieval storyteller’s second responsibility: to act as a guide.

Acting as a Guide: Responsibility to our Scholarship

Reflecting on the creative process involved in this performance, Lindsey Gibb, who specialises in researching and telling stories from history, raised the question of ‘tradition bearing’, and how we can deal with stories from cultures that no longer exist. Academic editions of medieval texts are augmented by scholarly introductions, translations of difficult words and footnotes helping readers make sense of them. Where in the workshops, academics provided extended context, in performance the storyteller is the chief resource (immediately) available to their audiences. Collaborative work between academics and storytellers can therefore ensure the audience does not just hear the uninformed ‘bones’ of the original stories, they also get sufficient context and tools for interpreting things a medieval audience would have taken for granted. It can also help the audience understand specific plot points (and plot holes), such as the problematic assumption in the Scottish Seven Sages that rape is only punishable by death if the empress was a virgin. This is the kind of work many of the workshop participants were already familiar with as literary scholars and creative artists.

Building on the information offered by Bildhauer, Flynn and Bonsall in the roundtable discussion preceding the workshop, Black introduced a series of exercises based on contextualising the Seven Sages: something the academics in the room were well-placed to provide. These were split into two types: macro and micro context. Macro context involves broad cultural research into key concerns underpinning the story, such as the significance of marriage in the Middle Ages, a king’s authority over his subjects, the role of bloodletting in medieval medicine, or the penalties for breaking curfew. Working in groups, the participants came up with a series of questions about the macro contexts a modern audience would need to understand to grasp what is at stake for the characters in their tale. Then, they were asked to communicate that complex context in one sentence. So the question:

What did it mean to be out after curfew?

became,

Between dusk and dawn, the house walls became the borders between private respectability and public shame.

The artists could then use these questions as a basis for future contextual research as they developed the stories.

Where macro context helps the audience navigate the underpinning social norms or values in medieval stories, micro context is useful for world-building. Paying attention to the little things in a story, such as the sound of a quill scratching across vellum, or what it feels like to wear layers of wool in the rain, is the kind of creative research that makes a medieval story come to life (Black, 2025). The participants were asked to think of an object a character in their story used (or might plausibly use), given time to research it, then asked to describe it at a key moment for that character. They then discussed how the description of that item might make the listeners feel, considering the emotional impact of a closely imagined medieval love letter in the ‘Inclusa’ story – the type of ink, the method of sealing, the care and agency taken to write it – or a carved child’s cradle like that in ‘Canis’ (perhaps patterned on a real cradle found in the National Museum of Scotland, which the performance attendees may well have seen).

Some of this work informed the final performances. In Rowan Morrison’s performance of ‘Puteus’ (the well), macro context was made clear through Morrison’s use of a single physical prop: a bell. Focusing on the way infringement of the social contract (perceived adultery and breaking curfew) could result in violent punishment, Morrison’s use of the bell gave weight to two moments of ending: the end of the day in the story, and the end of the tale, before the moral. Her attention to the impact of the curfew bell emphasised the high stakes of its ringing for its characters and effectively linked her moralising to the broader social attitudes she explored. Another moment of context appeared in Donald Smith’s telling of Vaticinium, the prince’s story about the prophetic interpretation of birdsong, in which a young man predicts that one day his parents will kneel before him and wash his feet. Smith outlined the tradition of hospitality after a journey, particularly to one of noble status, and then lingered on the soft towels, the beautiful silver basin, and the performance of humility and obeisance that such objects implied. Comfort, luxury, and the emotional impact of the gesture came through in his telling, affecting the audience’s understanding both of macro contexts (the rules of hospitality and of the treatment of royalty) and micro contexts (the material objects’ significance in this interaction). Smith later reflected on the importance of this work in conveying the emotion of this moment, and how critical such elements are to the genre of this tale: ‘That was a genuine moment of reconciliation and forgiveness. And that’s you know, that’s capital-R Romance… reunion after long separation’ (Smith, interview, 2025). Attention to the micro- and macro-contexts of that moment gave texture and weight to the emotions that define such generic moments, which Smith adeptly deployed.

Acting as an Ally: Responsibility to Marginalised Groups Represented in Texts

While the previous sections covered practical techniques for contextualising medieval stories, sometimes moments of dissonance offer creative opportunities to challenge elements of the worldviews present in texts like The Seven Sages. To uncritically re-tell stories which have misogynist, transphobic, classist or racist elements – no matter what nuance and complexity academics may discern in their treatment of sensitive material – risks reproducing these structures in the modern world, or implicitly condoning their worldviews by placing them in the mouth of someone with authority (a storyteller or academic). As Jonathan Hsy (2021), Suzanne Edwards and Matthew X. Vernon (2024) and others have argued, medieval sources, histories and fictions have frequently been used to perpetuate white and male-centric myths which continue to do harm today. Any creative response to, or engagement with, the medieval past must therefore necessarily grapple with both medieval history and its afterlives. As the other papers in this issue make clear, the Seven Sages material is steeped in misogyny, classism, racism, and transphobic gender essentialism, all of which need sensitive handling in performance. This characterised the third responsibility discussed in the workshop: to act as an ally to marginalised groups represented (if sometimes only in passing) in texts, but especially to groups these stories still have the power to distress or harm. For the Scottish Seven Sages stories, these groups included women, whose lived experiences of discrimination might be echoed in the multiple misogynist depictions of women in the embedded stories or in the rape-accusation plot of the frame narrative. The Scots frame narrative also includes a lover-character, who is presented as the empress’ serving woman but is dramatically revealed to be ‘really’ a man at the end of the story and, it is assumed, to have donned this disguise to sleep with the young empress. This character is found in the Historia septem sapientum branch of the Seven Sages tradition, though not in the French prose Version A tradition, which is otherwise presumed to be the primary source-material for the Buke (Van Buuren, 1982; Bildhauer, Bonsall and Nöth, 2024–). The inclusion of this motif, which bears marked similarity to a plot device in the Roman de Silence, as discussed by Bildhauer and Pepe elsewhere in this special issue, is one of the clues Van Buuren cites indicating the Buke had multiple sources, including a Historia text (Van Buuren, 1982; Bildhauer and Pepe, 2025). This motif reiterates dangerous (and current) transmisogynist ideologies suggesting men don female clothes to access female spaces that place trans women at real risk. Given how little this character is developed in the Scots text (they do not speak, and are described only through the prince using them as ‘proof’ of the empress’s perfidy), this character does not have the nuanced complexity of other medieval proto-trans figures like Silence. The storyteller working with this part of the narrative therefore needed to consider the potential impact of their approach to this moment today.

To explore the challenges and opportunities arising from telling these stories, the workshop therefore provided some questions to think with:

(How) can we call misogynist or transmisogynist ideas out while remaining faithful to the medieval plot?

What do we do when the frame narrative itself is fundamentally misogynist?

How can we unsettle a medieval text’s assumptions about the world?

The rest of the workshop focused on practical techniques for ‘meeting’ and ‘parting company’ with our source texts, combining creative practice with a critical reading of the texts (Black, forthcoming). One of the key things to come out of these discussions was the recognition that academics and creative artists also bring their own subjectivity and values to the adaptation and analysis process. Reflecting after the performances, Giles, whose rendition of the frame narrative included the revelation of the empress’ lover’s ‘real’ sex, discussed her commitment to turning the original text’s transmisogyny into a question about narrative bias in storytelling, about ‘what stories are for’:

Dealing with the fact that the text is deeply misogynist, transmisogynist, and I have the most misogynist, transmisogynist bit of it, I think I was… determined to sort of take that and be okay with that. To make the whole thing a question about how we tell stories… I felt like I had to set not just the narrative frame, but the ideological frame, the interpretive frame for the whole thing, which is, we’re going to tell some stories that make you think about how stories are told (Giles, 2025).

Acknowledging this kind of ethical commitment is key, and Sanders notes: ‘what is often inescapable is the fact that a political or ethical commitment shapes a writer’s, director’s or performer’s decision to re-interpret a source text’ (Sanders, 2006: 2). Our discussions therefore opened up a conversation about what those commitments looked like for the workshop participants and for The Seven Sages of Scotland project more broadly, which informed the creative and critical work going forward. For Giles, that manifested in her refusal to take what the original story says at face value and to instead insist on the audience’s critical reflection – a praxis not only reflective of interactive performance art’s frequent aims, but also (perhaps counterintuitively) the educational strategies around which texts like the Seven Sages were originally designed.

Confrontation

Sometimes, the best thing to do with questionable material is to call it out directly. Black explained how she uses this technique in her storytelling to re-figure characterisations or tropes which go unquestioned in the medieval texts. This can involve critically pointing out moments of racism, misogyny, ageism, ableism, antisemitism or classism, or highlighting abuses of power. This should be done carefully: if an audience is immersed in the story, this can jolt them out of it and risk turning the storyteller into a lecturer. However, confronting past prejudice can also make a story richer, by admitting the dangerous, painful, poignant or tragic. The workshop participants were therefore asked to identify moments in their stories where they might directly confront a power imbalance, then asked what would happen to the audience’s relationship with the story if they did this.

The most obvious and effective example of a direct call out in the final performance came in the frame tale itself. Giles, deftly narrating the opening and closing portions of the text, took the opportunity to pause and reflect on the narrative’s aims and goals, and to draw the audience’s attention to its politics. In Giles’s ‘Prolog’, at the point when the empress and the son are alone together and – the narrator tells us – she concocts a lie about attempted rape, Giles instead pointed out the essential unknowability of all such cases, saying:

Nou whit cam neist jeust twa folk ken,
an naither the wan is me, nor ony
o this nicht’s snack an skeely tellers,
but mony’s the tale thoo’ll hear at thinks
tae gar thee whit tae think, an hou
tae tell thee tales o women an men
an pouer an strouth an violence.
Jeust twa folk ken. A skrek, an then:
the wife runs oot. Her rowt is rape.
An reid, reid bluid poors doun her face (Giles, 2023).
[Now what came next just two people know, / And neither one is me, nor any / of this night’s sharp-witted and skillful tellers, / but many’s the tale you’ll hear which intends / to sway what you think, and how / to tell your tales of women and men / and power and force and violence. / Just two people know. A shriek, and then / the wife runs out. Her cry is rape. / And red, red blood pours down her face.]

Mony’s the tale, we are invited to infer, that will tell us how to judge women, and men, and young wives with blood on their faces and accusations on their lips. In this, Giles reminds the audience that this is a tale, but its effects, and misogyny, are echoed in reality. By focusing on the empress’ wounds, and questioning what ‘really’ happened, Giles opens the door for multiple readings, and calls out an uncritical interpretation of such narratives. This is precisely the sort of critical work that scholars such as Bildhauer have argued is both necessary for a feminist approach to the Seven Sages, and indeed a reflection of the text’s original intent: ‘in the context of this poetics aiming to teach wisdom and scepticism towards both women and bad advisers’ Bildhauer observes, the Seven Sages narrative ‘instead shows that every single version of the events is one-sided, and skill lies in accepting a plurality of voices’ (2023, p. 152; emphasis ours).

At the conclusion of the narrative, describing the violence enacted against both the empress and the lover, Giles again asked the audience to attend to the question of authority, reported speech, and uncertain truth. Giles referred to the lover as ‘a maid at’s notheen like. / A man, they say, in weemin’s claes’ (‘a maid that’s nothing of the sort. / A man, they say, in women’s clothes,’ emphasis ours). This nimbly sidestepped any assertions about the ‘true’ gender of the lover (while the word ‘maid’ was more often used for women in medieval texts it could be being applied to unmarried virgins of either sex), while leaving the question of who they are, and what their agenda might be, initially unanswered. However, Giles then elaborated, after detailing the punishments delivered to the empress and her companion:

The twa is strippit, an whippit, an then
the edge o a axe is pit tae thaim.
Order restored, an happiness.
Ilk i’ thir richtfu piece. Are they no?
Weel, yin’s the tale the fowk at wrote
the michty beuks wis wantan tae tell (Giles, 2023).
[The two are stripped, and whipped, and then / the edge of the axe is put to them. / Order restored, and happiness, / each in their rightful place. Are they not? / Well, that’s the tale the folk that wrote / the mighty books wanted to tell].

Just as Lundt (2020) also observed of the influence of different Seven Sages writers on the levels of misogyny in the texts, the ‘fowk at wrote / the michty beuks’ are then revealed as the true culprits here. The rhetorical question (‘Are they no?’) unsettles the ‘order’ and ‘happiness’ the medieval text blithely describes as its conclusion. In so doing, Giles not only reflects upon the tales that served the interests of the authors of ‘michty beuks’, but also creates space for a meditation on a different gender-narrative, an alternative (perhaps oral) literary inheritance, albeit unrecorded:

But think, it wisno only sages
at passed thir wiseheid doun the ages…
whit tales wad the wives hae telt
o emperors an sons an sages,
whit wey wad they weygh the scales? Whit rede
wad they gie thir dowters? An hou
wis that tales no kept safe in beuks? (Giles, 2023).
[But think, it was not only sages / that passed their wisdom down the ages… / what tales would the wives have told / of emperors and sons and sages / what way would they weight the scales? What counsel / would they give their daughters? And how was it that those tales were not kept safe in books?].

Giles here articulates an age-old argument about identity, perspective, and authorship (notably also made by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who suggests that clerks find it constitutionally ‘inpossible’ to ‘speke good of wyves’) (Chaucer, 2008, ll. 688–689). At the same time, in an oral performance of a narrative about storytelling, she surfaces the suggestion that perhaps written, literary, authoritative narratives about gender will always replicate existing structures of power and dominance, but that subversive, perhaps folk- and oral-literary spaces might imagine more flexible alternatives.

Giles’s treatment of, and confrontation with, this material is appropriately serious, as its stakes themselves are serious. It also demonstrates that the process of calling out a text does not have to be didactic. It can be used in more light-hearted ways, which often add humour to the texts. There is a lot that is ridiculous in medieval texts, and medieval authors like John Gower, Marie de France and Geoffrey Chaucer often wielded humour and sarcasm towards their storytelling, too – especially when referring, like Giles, to the ‘sages’ who told these stories before them. In describing her modern poetry based on Beowulf, poet and academic Laura Varnam describes reading ‘with an eye roll, my translation […] suggests that we might very well be weary of that same old story of masculine heroism, privileged and endorsed by patriarchal culture’ (Varnam, 2022: 107). Sanders also notes the effectiveness of defamiliarization in approaching familiar narratives, ‘inviting us as readers or spectators to look anew at a canonical text that we might otherwise have felt we had ‘understood’ or interpreted to our own satisfaction […] to reveal what is repressed or suppressed in the original’ (Sanders, 2006: 99). Humour can therefore be an effective way to form a connection between teller and audience, while disrupting a text’s outdated ideology.

The performers took up this suggestion, and at several points used humour to different effects. In her rendition of ‘Gaza’, the tale of the son who beheads his father rather than allow his theft to be discovered, Lindsey Gibb used comedy and direct address to the audience to highlight the incomprehensibility of the narrative: ‘why on earth our brother thought that was the best solution…’. On the other hand, Rowan Morrison’s embodiment of hyperbolic, parodic misogyny in ‘Puteus’ was certainly satirical, even funny, but rather than creating a connection with the audience, this tactic instead highlighted the original text’s unpleasantness, creating a sense of critical distance between audience and narrative.

‘Some stories grant power, some strip it away’

The last part of the workshop encouraged participants to think about the power structures at work in their stories, and how they might play with story perspective to admit voices the original texts do not centre. This is a key part of intersectional feminist creative and academic practice (Edwards and Vernon, 2024; Cowan, Morton, and Todd, 2020). The group were therefore asked to consider their story and discuss:

Who has power at the start, and end, of the story?
Does the power balance change?
Does the story question, challenge or strip away power, or does it support the status quo?

They were then asked whether they would keep those power structures the same in their telling. One of the key strategies for those wishing to challenge a story’s power structures is to feature different perspectives in the story: perspectives, in Varnam’s words, ‘the poet chose not to privilege (but nevertheless enables us to glimpse from the corner of our eyes)’ (Varnam, 2022: 106). This might involve giving the perspective of a character who is largely silent in a story (The Seven Sages has a prominent silent character in the form of the accused son), or critically imagining the perspectives of characters the original story depicts as marginalised or malevolent. Edwards and Vernon note that this is a key part of creative feminist medievalist work, which may ‘offer an understudied critical lens for addressing the silences produced by historical forces and the structure of medieval studies’, and allow us to ‘hear the hints of marginalized voices beneath authorized and authorizing strata’ by ‘reading past archival silences through layers of mediation’ (Edwards and Vernon, 2024: 5). New perspectives can radically change a story even when the plot remains the same. It can also call into question the assumptions made by the original text’s author, redactor, and/or archivist and unlock new readings, ideas and sympathies in the listener – a central element to feminist, queer and postcolonial readings, which prioritise originally marginalised perspectives. This approach is also a method of close reading and works particularly well alongside research, as well as performance practices.

Two of our tellers adopted first-person perspectives – specifically, those of women – in their adaptations of the text. The first, Mae Diansangu, chose to tell the story ‘Tentamina’ (the test) from the perspective of the wife who tests her husband’s patience, and eventually has her blood let nearly to the point of death in punishment. This allowed Diansangu to linger on the young woman’s fears, and the desperation, betrayal, and youthful vulnerability beneath her appeals to her ‘mither’ (mother) for advice and support – something the original text does not surface obviously or explicitly. However, as Cynthia Ho observes, the many ‘truant sympathies’ of the narrative, the problematisation of the January/May marriage, and the ‘obviously misaligned moral’ render the text internally complex, despite the emphatic misogyny of the sage’s moralisation against women’s speech (Ho, 1992: 96). In the audience Q&A, Diansangu explained that adopting the wife’s perspective in telling this tale helped her make sense of the narrative’s inconsistencies, as well as the ‘weirdness’ of the larger frame narrative (Diansangu, 2024). Lindsey Gibb’s use of perspective also leaned into that ‘weirdness’. Her shift from third to first person perspective at the end of her adaptation of ‘Gaza’ gave voice to the bewilderment of the sister whose brother has beheaded their father and wounded himself, and was brilliantly jarring in its unexpectedness. She explained that this was a way of stressing the impact of the story’s violence, and the fact that violence should be troubling:

I thought, well, we need to see the impact on somebody. And the obvious person to have the impact on is the sister. I see my way into most of these things [storytelling] usually through a female character – not always, but that’s where I’ll start, and think about her role and where she’s coming from. You can do bloody violent from a distance, but actually I think we needed the impact. And you know, this [violence in the story] is not okay (Gibb, 2025).

By dropping us into the sister’s experience, the tale’s goriness was brought home in a surprisingly affective way, and the ripple effects of the central violence made more obvious. This choice also validated the sister’s affective response to the violence perpetrated by her brother in a way the original medieval story did not.

Donald Smith also played with perspective, noting the care he had taken in his adaptation of the son’s story, and its positioning as the final tale in the performance. He explained he was aware of the double significance this held as the final story, told by the formerly silent prince, and wanted to call attention to the different layers of storytelling:

I said, ‘I’ll tell you the last tale just as the laddie tells it’. But then I said, ‘But laden with the weight of years and wisdom. A grey head of the sage’. So on the one hand, I’m saying I’m going to tell it as he told it, but you know, there’s an extra layer here because I’m a wise guy, and how I’m going to put this across is going to be clearly is going to carry some extra weight…it’s not a dead metaphor because they’re all sitting there looking at the scales (Smith, 2025).

Smith, the oldest of the performers (and the only man), obliquely references his own perceived position in the telling of this tale, making the layered narrative visible while also indicating the different kinds of ‘weight’ the audience might give to each teller’s words.

Performance Response

In audience-response surveys (collected after the July 22, 2023 performance, via an anonymous Google form), attendees reported that The Seven Sages of Scotland changed their thinking about storytelling as a way of engaging with medieval material, and also about The Seven Sages narrative itself. They observed the performers ‘really brought alive stories I wouldn’t have sought out myself’ in ‘vivid, entertaining and complex ways’, and that the ‘physical theatre’ and performance elements allowed for deepened and more emotional engagement with the material.

Several audience members were sensitive to the creative choices the artists had made to bridge the gap between medieval and modern cultures in their telling. One particularly enjoyed Lawrenson’s story, ‘set in a future Edinburgh’ which ‘helped the audience to connect with the story in a more immediate way’. The huge diversity of storytelling methods the project model had facilitated was also commented on by both the artists and audience members. The artists explained how they enjoyed the creative freedom this had given them, while the structuring device of the frame narrative and its visual representation in the pair of scales gave a cohesiveness to their individual performances, ‘conveying the ways in which complex emotional material gets simplified into being merely pro or against’. One audience member enjoyed the challenge this posed to the audience to ‘work out what these stories had in common, how they spoke to each other and to the central cause,’ and that their interpretation ‘changed as the event continued and more stories entered the fray’. This suggests that the performance was successful in giving the audience a sense of agency, or shared ownership, over the telling with the performers.

Both audience and artists pointed to the importance of Bonsall and Flynn’s introduction to the original Scots text at the beginning of the performance, noting that it helped them to appreciate the significance of the stories as well as ‘preparing the audience in how to approach and understand the performance’. This is an important finding, as it suggests that, even in performance traditions which, like this one, encouraged creative adaptations of the stories, audiences still appreciate hearing about the medieval context (again stressing the importance for storytellers to act as a bridge between medieval text and modern audience). However, both the artists and the audience respondents also seemed to value the medieval tales’ modern relevance. They noted that the connections between past and present were ‘made manifest’ by the ‘embodied mode’ of performance. The impact of these stories when encountered on the page is wholly different from when they are told by living people – especially (given the narrative’s preoccupations) women. The ‘re-inscription of the stories through women narrators/storytellers highlighted the gender concerns that are so central to the narrative’, one respondent observed. This echoed a point made by Donald Smith after the event, that the story’s gender concerns now feel even more relevant to contemporary discourse ‘than […] when [we] started the project’ in 2023 (Smith, interview, 2025). The audience respondents emphasised the impact of telling medieval tales with ‘parallels between medieval and modern preoccupations’. One argued that our choice of tales and tellers were themselves an effective means of bringing questions of gender today ‘to the fore, without necessarily needing to be more explicitly didactic’. This suggests the effectiveness of medieval storytelling as a supportive space through which today’s anxieties around gender and identity might be navigated and contextualised in a non-threatening manner.

One of the most important observations from the perspective of this special issue, and of the project as a whole, was that it inadvertently acted as a microcosm, or a controlled test environment, for exactly the kinds of adaptive processes the Seven Sages project has charted on a transnational, translinguistic level (see Eming, 2025 and the introduction to this special issue). Several audience members appreciated how each teller brought ‘their own twist and flavour’ to the stories:

The great strength of this event, for me, was its variety: the way it allowed for different voices and languages within the framework of the Seven Sages narrative; the range of storytelling styles it inspired, from pared-down retellings with gesture to more extravagant satires on the contemporary Edinburgh Festival. All this made it possible to access the medieval narrative from different angles, coming to it from first one, then another perspective.

The feedback noted that the variety of telling styles and modes of performance also prevented the range of different Scots voices – some of which were close to contemporary English, some which were not – from being an impediment to understanding, even for those less familiar with Scots. The linguistic and stylistic variation observed in the performances is consistent with what the work of our colleagues in this issue, as well as the project database, has shown. When stories travel, or are told by different voices, they absorb and reflect the needs and preoccupations of that new culture. The fact that this process is, like the many medieval versions of the Seven Sages, already manifesting itself in new materials was made clear from follow-up interviews with the project’s storytellers. Lindsey Gibb reported the lasting impact this project has had on her storytelling, noting that it had come at a time she was just considering getting back into using Scots in her creative practice. It was ‘a real opportunity and pleasure’ to have a Scots-specific performance, she said, and ‘I’ve now made [Scots performance] opportunities for myself’; the project represented ‘quite a big turning pivot for me’ (Gibb, interview, 2025). The stories have also influenced other artists’ publications. Dorothy Lawrenson published a version of her Seven Sages adaptation in the online Scots writing magazine Eemis Stane (Lawrenson, 2025a). Harry Josephine Giles reported the ongoing influence of this project, both in her new writing project on Orkney fable, oral cultures and new fables responding to contemporary events, and a chapter on the persistence of transmisogynist archetypes in 1990’s Scottish literature (forthcoming, 2026).

Reflecting on the process of organising The Seven Sages of Scotland, Flynn and Bonsall identified a few elements which could have been improved. An expanded timeline to facilitate more points of collaboration between contributors and academics, and between the participants themselves, would have allowed still more nuanced engagement with the text. Some of the practical considerations of performance management were also not immediately obvious to the organisers. For example, the number of participants and the complexity of the piece required not only organisers but, we eventually realised, directors – roles which we were not originally prepared for, but which, thanks to the patience and generosity of the performers, we eventually navigated sufficiently. Additionally, although the organisers shared a statement of project aims upon recruiting participants, a clearer statement of values – including our expectations of direct and thoughtful engagement with issues of violence, transphobia, and sexism – was also needed. Some creatives who initially expressed interest in the project eventually declined to participate, due in part to the sensitivity of the political issues addressed, and increased clarity from the start may have smoothed that process.

However, it was clear that the final group of performers were united in their understanding of the project’s purpose, and also in their reflections upon the success of both the performances and the preparatory workshops. Donald Smith reflected upon the efficacy of the methodology, expressing his hope that more projects will adopt this model of collaboration between researchers and artists in the future, and in particular continuing to explore the rich, relevant archive medieval materials provide for today’s storytellers and story listeners. For medievalists, this process amplified and made urgent many of the concerns within the text, and also offered new and subversive readings of previously unexplored textual elements. Not only this, but close attention to the strategies employed by the performers revealed persistent correspondence with some of feminist scholarship’s critiques of the Seven Sages, beyond the scope of our initial information sessions. Observing the way the artists gravitated toward subversive, multi-vocal, affective, and inclusive readings of the original stories – from Diangsangu’s emotive ‘Tentamina’, to Gibb’s grieving sister in ‘Gaza’, to Giles’s meditation on narrative instability – not only demonstrated the powerfully moving potential of performance, but also served as proof points for the effectiveness of feminist criticism in revealing narrative complexities that, it seems, may be made manifest through creative as well as scholarly approaches. And finally, this adaptive process demonstrated the simultaneous continuity and transformation of the Seven Sages tradition, making The Seven Sages of Scotland only the latest in many centuries of appropriation and revision of this narrative to suit changing tastes and political concerns.

Acknowledgments

Enormous thanks to Dr Caitlin Flynn, without whom the Seven Sages of Scotland would never have existed, and whose help in the early stages of this paper was invaluable. Thanks to the Seven Sages performers, whose work brought this material to such vibrant life: Harry Josephine Giles, Donald Smith, Lindsay Gibb, Rowan Morrison, Dorothy Lawrenson, Shona Cowrie, Mae Diansangu, and Laura Cameron-Lewis. Thanks also to the Byre Theatre staff, and the team at the Scottish Storytelling Centre for their assistance with both performances. Thanks to Belle Moseley for the transcription of the post-performance Q&A. Jane Bonsall’s work on this was supported by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.