Online Talk: 'The Seven Sages of Rome' Database
Date 6 October 2026 19:00 - 20:30
Location Online talk
Speaker Jane Bonsall
'The Seven Sages of Rome' Database
A Folklore Society online talk by
Jane Bonsall
Tuesday 6 October 2026
19:00-20:30
The narrative often referred to in English as The Seven Sages of Rome, also known as Historia Septem Sapientum, The Book of Sinbad the Philosopher, Roman des sept sages, Dolopathos, or The Seven Viziers, was one of the most popular, widespread and multilingual storymatters in the premodern world. Appearing in more than thirty languages, ranging from Syriac, Greek, and Persian to Czech, Welsh, and Icelandic, the frame narrative with its accompanying embedded moral tales was a medieval bestseller - but has been understudied in contemporary scholarship.
As part of a recent AHRC/DFG funded project, Jane Bonsall designed and populated a database which will facilitate multilingual, comparative, and in depth study of The Seven Sages in all its forms. The Seven Sages Database catalogues all known manuscript and print witnesses of the text, as well as describing different textual and linguistic variations, and includes the details of the embedded stories found in each version (many of which have direct parallels in traditional fables, exempla, and folk narratives).
In this talk, Jane Bonsall will introduce the Seven Sages narrative tradition, as well as outlining the digital tools and knowledge organisation systems implemented in the Database for its study. She will then focus on the way the Database treats the embedded stories, outlining the way hyperlinks and tags work to highlight the connections and contrasts between them, and how the Seven Sages corpus sits alongside other repositories of traditional tales.
Dr Jane Bonsall is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews, whose work focuses on gender, genre, and medieval and modern storytelling. She completed her PhD in medieval literature at the University of Edinburgh in 2018, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Universities of Birmingham (2021-2023) and St Andrews (2023-2026). Her recent publications include her monograph, Women and Magic in Medieval Romance (Boydell and Brewer, 2025), edited collections including Reconsidering Consent and Coercion (ed. with Hannah Piercy; Brepols, 2025) and articles such as ‘Adapting and Performing The Seven Sages of Scotland,’ (with Daisy Black, 2026).
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