1. Introduction

In 1708, the French Orientalist François Pétis de la Croix (fils) published the first (partial) European translation of the Ottoman Forty Viziers into French: Histoire de la sultane de Perse et des visirs: Contes turcs.¹ In doing so, he hoped to create a counterweight to the enormously popular translations of the Arabian Nights into French by his colleague and rival Antoine Galland (1704–1708; Robert, 2006: 7). Probably in order to spark his potential recipients’ curiosity, he introduced the book with a preface that included a warning and an apology to his female readers. He explained that they might feel offended by its typically ‘oriental’ content, stressing in particular the attitude towards women. I will use the editor’s comments as a starting point for a discussion of the extensive flexibility and multilinguality of The Seven Sages of Rome material:²

Nos Dames Françoises ne doivent pas […] trouver mauvais que Chéc Zadé ait écrit des Contes qui chargent si fort le beau Sexe ; c’est un Auteur Turc. Le caractere de sa Nation l’excuse. […] J’ajoûteray que les Musulmanes, peut-être parce qu’elles sont renfermées & privées de tous les divertissemens publics qui amusent les autres femmes, ne s’occuppent qu’à chercher les moyens de se procurer du plaisir.

Our French ladies should not […] find it wrong that Chéc Zadé wrote tales that so strongly criticize the fair sex; he is a Turkish author. The character of his nation excuses him. […] I will add that Muslim women, perhaps because they are withdrawn and deprived of all the public entertainments that amuse other women, only occupy themselves with seeking ways to procure pleasure for themselves (Pétis de la Croix, 1708: A2v).

In this blend of popular notions about Muslim customs on the one hand and the female gender on the other, Pétis de la Croix manages to mutually highlight and reinforce both subjects. It is surprising that such stereotypical descriptions of Muslim women would come from a cultural specialist. He could (or should?) have known better. Read today, they confirm Edward Said’s observation that Western academic Orientalists constructed the image of an exotic and culturally inferior Eastern ‘other’, which he sharply criticised (Said, 2003: 31–110). Moreover, in a characteristic orientalising manner, Pétis de la Croix treats the Forty Veziers itself as part of the Eastern ‘other’ and ignores its connections to the Seven Sages tradition so prominent in French literary history (Foehr-Janssens, 2023).

While attesting to the early modern Querelle des Femmes and the question as to the degree to which women are emotionally affected and endangered by literature, the gendered warning in the preface re-enforces the orientalisation, and vice versa. At first glance, European women seem to be considered superior to their Near Eastern counterparts, since they are described as having more refined manners and emotions that might be offended by the contents of the book. Turkish women, on the other hand, are misogynistically constructed as driven by their sexual desires. Locking them up, as was supposedly the custom in Muslim countries, was thought to only heighten this pressure for sexual relief. But European women also need distraction by literature, as ultimately, they are driven by the same uncontrolled urges. By way of this line of reasoning, the apology to European women is no less misogynistic than the depiction of their Turkish counterparts.

This intersectional setting of gender, culture and religion is specific to the European introduction of the Forty Viziers. Similarly, a general bias towards the female gender is characteristic of the story cycle (Bildhauer, 2023), and a distancing from its Near Eastern origins is typical for European scholars. While the following article will be mainly concerned with the divide between Eastern and Western transmissions, and will argue that there are many reasons to overcome it, I will also touch again on the gender bias.³ The construction of the narrative as a whole can simply not be understood without it. Since the Ottoman/Turkish tradition is outside of my linguistic and literary expertise, I will not dwell on it extensively. My argument will move from a focus on the Forty Viziers tradition – which has been widely overlooked in scholarship but offers an engaging perspective on the tradition as a whole – to a discussion of the Seven Sages narrative as a global tradition, using the European versions as an endpoint. Each of the following sections will be devoted to one central question, moving from how the transmission of the Ottoman version of the narrative reflects the multilingual nature of the tradition as a whole, to how the gendered dynamics of the narrative are reflected in the Seven Sages tradition and the Ottoman Forty Viziers in particular, to what ‘version’ means when we analyse the Seven Sages transmission, to how the Forty Viziers might be integrated into the study of the global transmission of the Seven Sages, to what the Seven Sages tradition can contribute to our understanding of the poetics of the short story, and finally addressing how digital humanities and AI might be harnessed to study the tradition.

2. The Ottoman/Turkish tradition in its multilingual context

While Pétis de la Croix chose to distance the Forty Veziers entirely from the French versions of the same story matter, an approach considering both language versions as part of the same transmission is much more promising. Pétis de la Croix perhaps did not know about the Seven Sages of Rome story in one of its many French redactions. On the other hand, he might indeed have been aware of it, but preferred to dismiss its connection in order to maintain a good selling point for his own publication. Or he might have simply found the connections between the Forty Viziers and the Seven Sages material to be tenuous. Ironically, with his linguistic skills and mastery of the Turkish language, Pétis de la Croix would have been very well equipped to make himself familiar with the text. In this regard, it might be worthwhile to discuss the opinion held by some that the generally broader linguistic knowledge of earlier generations of scholars made them more capable of reading, understanding, and discussing the Seven Sages of Rome transmission. Inversely, the lack of such skills by later generations – including myself – may have led to them losing interest in the Seven Sages of Rome.

For future research into the Seven Sages of Rome across languages we might find ourselves increasingly relying on English translations and on AI as a tool for preparing such translations. Even though this would confirm once more ‘the general preponderance of English’ in global literature as analysed by Alexander Beecroft, it would still help to overcome ‘the general isolation of even very populous non-European languages from any kind of global literary system’ (Beecroft, 2015: 256). Furthermore, if we created synoptical editions that also feature the source language, we would honor the commonly held opinion that languages, literatures, philosophical systems and terms remain untranslatable to a certain degree. This is a tendency that some critics of the ‘globalization’ of literature sometimes feel gets overlooked (Apter, 2014).

As for the Forty Viziers, relatively soon after its first publication, Pétis de la Croix’s French redaction was translated into German. The preface with its apology was taken up word for word by an anonymous German translator and added to his own preface in 1728 (Anon, 1728: 2–3). Walter Friedrich Adolph Behrnauer’s publication from 1851 is the first complete translation of a manuscript of the Forty Viziers tradition from Turkish into German. Behrnauer translated from the so-called Dresden manuscript (Dresd. Ea. 149, 17^th century), which is very similar to a manuscript dating from the 18^th century. This Turkish manuscript (Topkapı Revan, 1081) presumably represents a 15^th century version of the text that is now believed to be the oldest (Gara, 2024: 68, 84). In addition, an English translation by E. J. W. Gibb from an undated printed edition of a 17^th century manuscript is available (Gibb, 1886). However, Gibb took some typical 19^th century editorial liberties, adding more stories from other narrative traditions (Teczan, 2014). For now, I will rely on Behrnauer, which according to established philological criteria is more ‘faithful’ to the original. In the long run, however, it might also be interesting to discuss whether Gibb was actually faithful to a poetological tradition within the transmission history of the Seven Sages of Rome since he chose to add more stories that he considered fitting.

Behrnauer’s translation contains a table of contents that provides a very good overview of the embedded stories—more than 80 in all (see Figure 1). We see that the narration alternates between one of the viziers and the female narrator, and – consistent with other versions from the tradition, like the Greek Syntipas or the Latin Historia de septem sapientum – is always framed by interpretations of the story by a vizier or the queen, respectively. Collectively, there are more than 100 embedded stories from the Forty Viziers tradition that come from more than 70 identified manuscripts (Teczan, 2014).

Figure 1

Behrnauer, 1851: Table of Contents (detail), p. 1. Public domain.

Behrnauer continues the general topos of the Seven Sages of Rome tradition of giving several dedications and prefaces providing commentaries on the circumstances of the publication before the frame story begins. Since multiple framing is a typical feature of Middle Eastern frame tales (see Marzolph, 2024: 34), this is no coincidence. Early modern editors of oriental tales know their material well and play with this older tradition in order to channel some of their own views. In Behrnauer’s case, more than 100 years after Pétis de la Croix, the editors still felt a need to justify and clarify their publishing endeavors. This time, however, it appears to be less of a veiled marketing strategy. For instance, in the preface by Behrnauer’s mentor and doctoral advisor Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, hints are made concerning the notorious ‘Turkish danger’ in early modernity. Fleischer explains that ‘One could be under the impression that the old fear of the Turk in Europe had in West European and specifically German Christendom turned into a fear of the Turkish language’ (‘Moechte man doch meinen, die alte Furcht vor dem Tuerken sei bei der westeuropaeischen und namentlich deutschen Christenheit in eine Furcht vor dem Tuerkischen umgeschlagen’, Behrnauer, 1851: VI). This is not primarily a suggestion concerning popular attitudes, but refers to academic standards. At this point, when compared to the two other major Near East languages (Arabic and Persian, Behrnauer, 1851: VI), research into the Turkish language and literature was neglected at German universities.

Moreover, unlike Pétis de la Croix, Behrnauer makes a connection to the European narrative tradition, stating in his preface that the Forty Viziers is a ‘very free redaction’ (‘sehr freie Bearbeitung’, Behrnauer, 1851: IX) of a highly successful German narrative known as Die Sieben weisen Meister (The Seven wise Masters). He also knows the Eastern and Western transmission history quite well, suggesting, as did many scholars from his generation, that the original version can be traced back to India. The paratexts then continue with an explanation that the following book had been translated from a quite meager Arabic into Turkish in memory of a mighty sultan Mahmud, who had ordered its creation (Behrnauer, 1851: 4–6). Again, Behrnauer plays with traditional rhetorics for introducing a translation of a text from the Seven Sages of Rome narrative, this time his own translation. For him, it is out of the question that the Forty Veziers is a part of this multilingual transmission.

3. Gendered discourse

Considering the Forty Veziers in their multilingual context also highlights its distinctively gendered setting for the embedded story-telling. Behrnauer’s table of contents (Figure 1) gives an impression of the reciprocity between each tale of a vizier, beginning on day one, and each tale of the queen, beginning on the first evening. The viziers tell their tales during the day, while the queen always delivers her tales during the following evening or night. The story of the Forty Viziers is supposed to have taken place in Persia, and in this case the prophecy of mortal danger faced by the young prince extends over a time span of 40 days (instead of seven, as in most other known versions).

While the viziers speak in public in front of an audience at court or in a town, the queen is forced to talk to her husband in private. Every new day begins with the king mounting his throne and ordering the executioner to kill his son. Then a vizier steps forward and presents a story, which results in the king granting the prince more time. Afterwards the king goes hunting and returns home to his palace in the evening, where he is greeted by his wife. After dinner, the queen asks her husband about his son and what he has decided to do with him. When the king admits to having spared his life one more time, she presents her own story. From this setting, one has to deduce that the king goes to court in the morning and acts publicly when ordering his son’s execution, while speaking in private with his wife in his own palace in the evening. This contrast between public stories by viziers or counselors at court and stories told by the queen in private is by no means restricted to the Ottoman versions, but has parallels in many versions of the tradition based on the Latin Historia septem sapientum (H). That the counselors and the emperor interact in a public sphere is also highlighted by the fact that in many H-versions the ‘common people’ (‘Volk’) have become an influential force during the trial, as Nico Kunkel has recently argued (Kunkel, 2023: 194–204). Perhaps even more interestingly, this could also explain why stories from both sides, as far as their content is concerned, never seem to directly refer to each other: the king’s counselors and the stepmother simply cannot listen to each other’s stories. The only one who gets to listen to all of them is the king or emperor himself (Kunkel, 2023: 190–193).

While one could make the point that the queen is the more prolific and resourceful storyteller, drawing on a wealth of stories she presents to her husband, she is talking to an extremely limited audience of one, in a private space in which women were allowed to speak (cf. Gara 2024, p. 71). Of course, the setting is one of several similarities to the Arabian Nights, where storytelling by a female narrator takes place exclusively at night in the bedchamber. In the same vein, one could argue that the female protagonist in the Forty Veziers also finds herself narrating for her life in a battle against time, even though this is less obvious than in the Arabian Nights. The female protagonist of the Seven Sages narrative cannot know that her stepson has made a vow to remain silent for a certain amount of time, and that she will be punished with death once the truth comes out. As in the Arabian Nights, and, for that matter, in Boccaccio’s Decamerone, the frame story works as a ‘Halsrahmen’, a given situation that could cost one’s neck, whereas the embedded storytelling is supposed to work against this death threat (Haug, 1991: 275). Finally, there is also an overlap of stories within these two narrative traditions whereby the Arabian Nights incorporates a version of the Seven Sages of Rome (Marzolph, 2024: 35).

Whether this tendency to restrict the woman’s speech to private spaces is a common feature of the narrative tradition as a whole is one of the intriguing questions that remains to be studied on a broad scale, that is, with regard to as many versions in different languages as possible. While this seems clearly to be the case in some German and Latin versions (Roth, 2008: 15/16, 28/29, 38/39 etc.), in the Greek Syntipas it is simply mentioned that the woman, in this case one of the emperor’s wives, appears before him after the advisors have finished their stories (Andreopoulos, 2021: 41, 53, 73 etc.).⁴

Within the context of the Seven Sages of Rome narrative as a whole, the setting described above establishes a disadvantageous position for the female narrator vis à vis the viziers who challenge her. This is because, unlike the viziers, she cannot speak in public nor expect general support for her case from a surrounding, attentive crowd. In order to make her case, she has to rely solely on her tale-telling talents, her rhetoric, and her general ability to influence her husband. In fact, her only power is in relation to her husband.

When compared with the overall tradition of the Seven Sages narrative, the frame story of the Forty Veziers is also quite elaborate. Some of the embedded tales are introduced by either the viziers or the queen with long, rhetorically refined monologues containing examples of sayings, quotations from the Quran and their interpretations, or entire stories. For instance, on the fifth night the queen introduces her story about a young man of disreputable parentage with the image of an oyster that manages to transform rain drops into a pearl—just as the Quran will lead to religious faith, good deeds, and insight in the heart of the believer, but cause only disbelief and obstinacy in the heart of the hypocrite (Behrnauer, 1851: 75). This tendency to explain and interpret the embedded tales, however, is well known from other European and Non-European versions.

So, the Forty Viziers have much in common with other textual witnesses (see Table 1). Table 1 shows clearly that no matter how many tales are narrated, and even if the overall number amounts to 40, the basic frame structure and, for most witnesses, an alternation between female and male narrator, are shared common features across languages. As Ulrich Marzolph explains with an eye to the general flexibility of the frame tale and the more specific case of the Seven Sages of Rome tradition: ‘the only expectation raised at the outset is the fact that seven sages tell at least a story each. Whether or not the sages each tell more than one tale or whether the calumniating woman tells tales or not (as in the Bakhtiyār-nāme) is flexible’ (Marzolph, 2024: 35). The same characteristic that Marzolph mentions for the Persian Bakhtiyār-nāme also holds for the European Dolopathos-tradition. Only the sages are telling embedded tales, while the female protagonist, following her initial accusation, remains silent. In this case, the gendered discourse focuses on the negotiation of clerical masculinities (Lundt, 2002: 73–213). One might also argue that since every narrator in the Dolopathos intends his story to repudiate an initial story by a woman, the structure of the text remains gendered.

Table 1

Overview of frame and embedded stories in different versions. Table courtesy of Elisabeth Böttcher and Carolin Pape, Freie Universität Berlin.

4. ‘Eastern’ versus ‘Western’ versions

Any consideration of the Seven Sages/Sindbad story matter as a multilingual whole comes up against its long-established division into an ‘Eastern’ and a ‘Western’ corpus. Pétis de la Croix was not the last scholar to assume a general divide between Eastern and Western narrative traditions. Seven Sages researchers have conventionally considered the medieval Western or European versions to represent a ‘fresh start’ that has left much of the Eastern tradition behind. What is the reason for this development, often criticised as European ‘arrogance’ (Marzolph, 2023: 194)? Longstanding unquestioned academic assumptions of European superiority have likely been at play, having led to European ‘orientalism’ as criticised by Said. According to Marzolph, for the Seven Sages this implies ‘the disrespect, denigration and colonial exploitation of the Eastern cultures to whom international tradition owes most of the tales’ (Marzolph, 2023: 194). Among other things, further research should certainly explore more deeply Mohsen Zakeri’s thesis that misogyny in particular has served as a projection of Western scholarship on the Eastern versions of the tale, as it is much more dominant in the Western versions (Zakeri, 2023: 174).

In a similar vein, Yasmina Foehr-Janssens has drawn attention to the fact that the earliest European versions significantly rework the frame story by introducing a Roman setting (Foehr-Janssens, 2020; see also Foehr-Janssens, 1994: 13–29), having the empress speak first and reducing the counselor’s stories to one each instead of two apiece as in the Sindbad/ Syntipas stories. In the long run, and across the numerous translations into different European languages, this proves to be another disadvantage for the female character. In the Forty Viziers she is already in a weaker position due to being forced to speak in private. Additionally, the reversed order of speakers also discriminates against her on a structural level since the men now always have the last word, and in many cases, she is also punished more harshly for her betrayal.

The divide between ‘East’ and ‘West,’ however, is also based to a certain degree on material evidence and on a general approach to the Seven Sages of Rome narrative through the differentiation of versions. While the term ‘version’ as used in Seven Sages of Rome scholarship can also refer to any individual text in any given language, a version is most importantly defined by the number and sometimes the order of stories a text contains. Since even the most influential European versions, A and H, share only a handful of stories with their Eastern predecessors, they were then considered to represent a new and different tradition.

The many European deviations from this general scheme are usually considered to be exceptions that prove the rule. A good example in the German tradition, for instance, is the late 15^th century Hystorij von Diocletiano, transmitted in a single manuscript, which replaces five embedded stories (Steinmetz, 1999). Nonetheless, the identification, description and comparison of individual tales has been of paramount importance for structuring the extremely heterogeneous Seven Sages of Rome material across the many languages and literatures in which it has been adapted. Across all languages and literatures, the various versions are always set within the identical frame tale of an unjustified accusation of sexual misconduct expressed by the wife of a powerful ruler towards his son. The embedded tales do not solve the conflict given in the frame story in any direct way. However, they always reflect the frame tale to a certain degree, which follows a definition for the Middle Eastern frame tale recently suggested by Ulrich Marzolph: ‘the frame tale offers an arena that is ruled by a specific agenda whose narrative elaboration is supplied by the embedded tales’ (2024: 29).

At the beginning of the 20^th century, Victor Chauvin provided an indispensable research tool with his listing of 254 embedded tales (Chauvin, 1904). The fact that 92 of these tales refer to the Forty Viziers and have nevertheless been included bears witness to an early understanding that the Turkish version does indeed belong to the overall textual tradition.⁵ As Marzolph explains, Chauvin’s list has also served as an important reference work for the well-known index by Aarne-Thompson on types of folktales (2023: 191). Whereas Chauvin used French titles for the tales, it is now common practice to follow Karl Heinz Goedeke (1864) in employing Latin titles (see also Table 1). This is significant given the importance of Latin as a lingua franca in Western Europe, and at the same time, as Marzolph notes (2023: 193), it somewhat ironically gives more credit to the Western continuation of the narrative than to the Near Eastern literatures from where it originates (for an overview of the Arabic, Syriac, Greek, Hebrew, Old Persian and Turkish tales, see Marzolph, 2023: 194–196). Behrnauer has also provided short German titles for the embedded stories in the Forty Veziers. However, a general, all-inclusive labelling of all embedded stories in a single language, Latin or otherwise, is something that Seven Sages of Rome scholarship still has to develop.

Any research into the Seven Sages of Rome tradition can build on this earlier scholarship and the groundbreaking work of structuring the overall transmission. From the standpoint of literary history and literary theory, however, this approach has to be supplemented by studies into concepts of the narration as a whole, into genre conventions, narrating styles, points of view, and many more.

5. The Forty Viziers and global Seven Sages of Rome transmission

The approach proposed here of seeing the transmission as a whole would allow scholars to re-engage with the Forty Veziers. Unfortunately, with regard to the progress of research into the Ottoman/Turkish tradition of the Forty Veziers, not much has changed since Fleischer’s lament about general neglect, with the notable exception of Eleni Gara’s well-informed article (Gara, 2024) on the book’s historical context, its connections to Ottoman literature and culture, as well as its gendered discourse and extensive discussion of good governance in the tradition of prince’s mirrors. This may have to do with the fact that in this tradition the embedded stories have the least amount of overlap with other known redactions.

A shift in methodology in Seven Sages of Rome research is necessary to appreciate fully the breadth and depth of its global success, which certainly includes the narrative of the Forty Viziers. ‘Global’ here does not mean ‘world-wide’. Research into ‘world history’ has not entirely been replaced by research into ‘global’ history. Global history aims to overcome older historiographical traditions focusing on the history of ‘nations’ or ‘empires’. It seeks to understand historical events in broader contexts and is interested in global entanglements (Conrad, 2013: 11–12). ‘Global’, in other words, does not mean ‘total’. Global history is also not limited to periods that identify themselves as global, as in present times, though there are good reasons for arguing that globalisation actually started in the Middle Ages, as Valerie Hansen (2020) asserts in her much-discussed book on the year 1000.

In regards to literary history, the term ‘global literature’ is no simple substitute for the older term ‘world literature’ as famously coined by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (see Damrosch, 2003: 1–36). At least in literary history, ‘global’ and ‘world’ remain valid currencies with each having difficult implications, and this applies to ‘world literature’ probably more so than to ‘global literature’ (Erthel and Stockhammer, 2020). ‘World literature’, while seeming to encompass all languages and literatures, is often based in Eurocentric notions of literature and their canons (Wertheimer, 2018: 282–297). The transmission of the Seven Sages of Rome story matter from East to West with its many subdivisions gives an excellent insight into the global entanglements between languages, literatures, ideas (Mulsow, 2018) and, indeed, cultures over a very long period. In fact, this was the earlier focus of Seven Sages of Rome research, which was able to solidly prove many important generic relations between texts, versions, and languages. Much, however, still needs to be done in this regard, especially with respect to versions in print, which, for instance in East European literatures (from Germany to Poland and Russia), have followed their own paths of transmission and connections. This even included the Forty Viziers, which in the 19^th century in Constantinople was also printed in the Bulgarian language (Skowronski and Marinescu, 1992: 152).

While stories of the Eastern tradition of the Seven Sages of Rome have been omitted in European versions, it should be appreciated that they have been replaced by tales that ‘derive from a variety of sources and vary considerably among the versions’ and that this tendency attests to great narrative ‘creativity and flexibility’ (Marzolph, 2023: 190, 192). As Oliver Biaggini has remarked with reference to the ‘Eastern’ Castilian version:

Seuls 4 des 23 contes du Sendebar castillan se retrouvent dans la branche occidentale, ce qui révèle à quel point l’œuvre a été modifiée dans son passage de l’Orient à l’Occident. En fait, la transformation n’affecte pas profondément la structure essentielle, c’est-à-dire le cadre narratif. Celui-ci a joué son rôle de cadre rigide jusque dans les évolutions dues à la transmission du texte: les contes enchâssés dans le cadre ont été considérés comme interchangeables, ce qui explique la disparition de certains d’entre eux au cours de la transmission.

Only 4 of the 23 tales of the Castilian Sendebar are found in the western branch, which reveals the extent to which the work was modified in its passage from the East to the West. In fact, the transformation does not profoundly affect the essential structure, that is, the narrative frame tale. This played its role as a rigid framework even in the evolutions due to the transmission of the text: the tales embedded in the frame were considered interchangeable, which explains the disappearance of some of them during the transmission (Biaggini, 2005: 5).

Since, as Biaggini surmises, the embedded tales are exchangeable, the question arises why this apparently worked so well across different languages. Adding and exchanging embedded stories as a literary practice was indeed so successful that even modern editors, like Gibbs, took it up. Within the framework of global literary theory, the transmission of the Seven Sages of Rome could be re-evaluated specifically through this interchangebility and varieties. It is an especially promising approach to the question as to how global literature and its canonisation might best be understood – not as universal and identical, but entangled and variable. The goal of such an analysis would less be to find ‘originals’. As Jorge Luis Borges suggests, quite provocatively but not without having a point, the story of Aladin, probably the most famous of the Arabian Nights, has probably been added by the editor Galland: ‘Some have suspected that Galland forged the tale. I think the word forged is unjust and malign. […] Why shouldn’t we suppose that after having translated so many tales, he wanted to invent one himself, and did?’ (Borges, 1986: 55). Furthermore, the goal of future research could also consist not only of varieties, but also commonalities across different tales. While the tales in Eastern and Western traditions might not be identical (or only rarely so), they might still be similar in many respects. Marzolph is right when he suggests that: ‘as we study the Middle Eastern frame tales and the respective authors’ intentions in shaping them, so future studies should take the embedded tales into account in a comprehensive comparative perspective, since each of them has likely been included for a specific reason’ (2024: 40). Such observations and analysis might lead to the exciting conclusion that across languages, a certain preconception existed as to what exactly constitutes such a collection of tales.

6. Genre and poetics of the short story

A multilingual approach to the Seven Sages/Sindbad tradition has to grapple with the question of its genre. Even fleeting inquiries reveal that many stories within the Seven Sages of Rome narration are concerned with the virtues and vices of women (and men), with questions of governance and decision-making, or trust within marriage and family. Whereas the Eastern transmission seems solidly rooted in the context of wisdom literature, questions of wisdom are by no means left out of the European versions. The same holds for other aspects such as general genre features, types of narratives and style. The embedded tales are of varying length, but, across different languages, are surprisingly similar with regard to their general mixture of types of short stories – it seems that some are always situated in the world of the nobility, others in that of merchants and craftsmen. Many contain marvelous elements, such as magicians or spells and share certain similarities with fairy tales. Because of their violent or obscene contents, others would be considered fabliaux. Still others work as fables featuring animals. Tales of animals and their supposedly ‘natural’ or ‘typical’ behavior are one of the most important shared elements across different versions. The tale Leo (The lion) from the Hebrew Mishle Sendebar (Tales of Sendebar) for instance, is built on the motif of a lecherous king lusting for a married woman. The queen’s story from the seventh night in the Forty Viziers (Der Sperling und sein Weibchen, The Sparrow and its Wife) deals with the question of mutual obligations in a marriage that is also present in the story Senecalcus (The Seneschal) transmitted in the H-version of the Seven Sages. So, in different versions of the narrative traditions, a general understanding in the selection of embedded tales has been at work that always combined some fables with some fabliaux and some stories about treacherous women. On the other hand, examined on a more detailed level, there are also decisive differences in the execution of certain tales. For instance, in the famous Canis (‘The Dog’) story shared across most literatures, some German H-versions introduce several women who are ultimately blamed for the wrongdoing of the dog’s master, while in the Greek Syntipas the master only blames himself (cf. for a similar analysis between the Dolopathos, the Spanish Book of the Wiles of Women from 1253 and a Middle English version of the Seven Sages of Rome from around 1350, Ho, 1992). In this vein, Nico Kunkel (Kunkel, 2020) has pointed to the importance of differences in even seemingly minor details, for instance, in the setup of the plot in the frame story of some European versions. He argues that they always affect the narrative as a whole.

A certain flexibility with regard to the evidence or moral that is offered by the different embedded stories has to do with genre conventions. In literary history, the poetics of the story or short story (‘Kleine Form’) in the Middle Ages and early modernity has been discussed and appreciated for a long time. When Hans Robert Jauß famously attempted to structure and define the different subgenres, he came up with nine different types of stories to be distinguished along 12 different criteria (modus dicendi, space, time, social function etc.) (Jauß, 1977: 46–47). In the most general terms, the embedded stories from the Seven Sages of Rome narration are considered exempla, meaning that they are intended to illustrate a general truth (Haug, 1991: 266–269). However, not only is this truth not always obvious, but narration cannot be simply reduced to illustrating just one line of reasoning. Especially when embedded in a frame tale, tension can arise with regard to how much the exempla fit the general case in question (see the discussion in Haug, 1991: 274–277). In this regard, the gendered structure of the discourse has led to some controversy. Concerning Latin and German H-versions, Ralf-Henning Steinmetz (Steinmetz, 2000) has argued that the stories told by the female protagonist do not align well with the overall case of the frame tale and are inherently paradoxical, while the stories of the wise men seem to be perfect fits and are convincing throughout. This view has since been challenged, and it would certainly be necessary to study in detail and across many different versions to determine whether and how the tales told by men and women really differ in this way.

A final consideration complicating the identification of the Seven Sages/Sindbad tradition’s genre and place in literary history is that manuscript and print transmission of the Forty Viziers is attested well into the 19^th century. Adaptations of the Seven Sages of Rome narrative in some East European languages only appeared first in the 16^th century (mostly in print), and continued until the 19^th century. This means we can no longer confine this literary history to European notions of pre-modernity and modernity, medieval and early modern literature, or medieval and early modern manuscript and print cultures. We have reason to seriously reflect on its European implications within the framework of global studies (Ertl and Oschema, 2022) and asynchronic temporalities (De Souza, 2024).

7. The potential of Digital Humanities and AI components

In the context of their discussion on how research into global history could be introduced into Medieval Studies, Thomas Ertl and Klaus Oschema point to the necessity of cooperation and academic exchange, since ‘adequately covering phenomena in their global context requires skills (first and foremost linguistic) that a single researcher can hardly possess’ (Ertl and Oschema, 2022: 13). They also suggest that it ‘requires an accepted medium of communication, and everything points to English becoming the most important lingua franca’ (Ertl and Oschema, 2022: 13). In other words, since philologists are necessarily experts for a limited number of texts, they should engage in interdisciplinary collaboration. Because they no longer possess the broad linguistic skills of earlier philologists, they could nonetheless take advantage of their proficiency in English. In addition, with the development of professional translating programs, we now have the tools to create English translations of literary texts in a relatively short amount of time. This holds for other languages as well. AI translations can be especially helpful in a robust multilingual tradition like the Seven Sages, where many scholars in different philologies pursue individual research interests. Some of them might even have a fair amount of knowledge in the target language – but perhaps not enough to read entire texts. Here the English language could serve as a perfect intermediary.

Of course, at this point we cannot completely rely on AI translations. Especially when translating from historical source languages with potentially problematic rhetorics towards gender, race and religion, we will need the skills of literary historians for a critical check of linguistic nuances and the range of historical semantics. However, these translations will potentially help many different readers, whether professional or not, for important basic information.

The same holds for OCR/HTR methods that are increasingly common in editing processes. While these digital tools are usually ‘quick learners’ when it comes to reading and transcribing historical source languages, critical proofreading by philologists still remains indispensable. Some time ago, Karla Mallette pointed out that the ‘multiplicity and complexity, as well as its sheer quantity, makes the […] Seven Sages a natural for digital study’ (Mallette, 2014: 140). In this case Mallette is referring specifically to the French Seven Sages of Rome, but her statement could easily be applied to other languages, or to the transmission as a whole. It could overcome the conventional divide of the material into separate ‘Eastern/Oriental’ and ‘Western’ corpuses and, instead, would approach the Seven Sages of Rome tradition as a global, pre-modern narrative in which versions and tales are capable of comparison. Without a doubt, a project on this scale would also face considerable challenges. It would have to result in a critical edition that brings together researchers from different philologies. It would consist of annotations in the traditional (critical) and modern (digital) sense of the term (Ernst et al., 2024). Due to many extant versions and manuscripts of the narrative in each language (for instance, about 20 in Greek and about 100 in German), the question of priorities is crucial. Which versions and which manuscripts should constitute the core texts of the synopsis, and how might the others be subsequently implemented? An even more complex question is how the versions should be presented in an overall annotated, synoptic, interactive, cross-referenced digital edition. This requires careful consideration and expertise as well as much support and input from the IT and AI sectors. Of course, both sets of questions intersect. Even though not all relevant research questions concerning the envisioned corpus can or should be anticipated, it is important to consider the major research agendas and how they could be reflected in the digital make-up of a synoptic edition.

Kunkel has paved the way for sophisticated DH-based Seven Sages of Rome research with his dissertation. Kunkel digitised and annotated 12 different texts (10 manuscripts, two prints) from the German tradition, each representing a different version or ‘redaction’ (Fassung). By way of an XML-based tagging of pre-conceptualised hermeneutical ‘modules’ in these texts, he shows that great differences exist between them in terms of length, motivation and narration. Especially helpful and productive was his decision to not only annotate frame narrations and embedded stories, but also to annotate the ‘introduction’ (Einleitung), ‘story’ (Erzählung) and ‘interpretation’ (Auslegung) within these embedded stories. Such a differentiation could be the key to better exploration and understanding of how the tradition has been shaped and modified according to various uses in different languages and cultures. It could also be of crucial importance for an understanding of how the poetics of the short story, as discussed above, work across languages and literatures.

This could dramatically enhance the opportunity for a broader re-introduction of the Seven Sages of Rome into literary studies. In the long run, a synoptic, multilingual, digital edition of the Seven Sages of Rome material that also provides English translations would allow comparative research and cross-disciplinary work on a large scale. It would be of immediate relevance to academics working in many linguistic areas and would represent the most ambitious and impactful multilingual editorial project of the material to date.

8. Conclusion

The potential insights to be gained into an entangled pre-modern global literature through the lens of the widely told, cross-cultural tales of the Seven Sages/Sindbad tradition are obvious. There are very few narrative traditions that have been transmitted across a similarly expansive scale of time, space and language, including Barlaam and Josaphat, Kalila and Dimna or the Arabian Nights. Because of their many versions and variants in more than 30 languages, the Seven Sages of Rome have an enormous amount to offer. What is more, while the Arabian Nights have – not at all to their disadvantage – from the start been considered in Europe to be ‘oriental’, European literatures made the Seven Sages of Rome narrative their own, adapting it linguistically, exchanging stories, adjusting the frame, while also adding illustrations and new paratexts (Schlusemann, 2023). In the end, a narrative tradition that in some contexts worked as a prince’s mirror (Zakeri, 2023) also negotiated common social practices like widowhood, mourning and burial practices in others (Jussen, 2000: 257–312). In doing so, the Seven Sages of Rome gives us a chance to understand how ‘global’ pre-modern literature works – evolving in different countries and regions, sometimes asynchronically, and peaking at different times. Individual manuscripts and prints could be considered as part of the transmission as a whole, written in a milieu in which polyglot communication was the norm. In short, the story cycle’s global and temporal extent allows an exciting comparison between the different languages, times, and social-cultural milieus in which it was told, re-told, adapted, transformed, translated and modified. With the recent progress in digital humanities and its methodologies for scholarly editing, there is great potential to enhance new research in decisive ways. It seems that if there were ever a time to join forces and bring separate branches of research on the Seven Sages of Rome in dialogue together and begin its research on a global scale, it is now.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.