SCRIPTA - Jutta Eming: A Sleeping Giant: The Transmission of the Sindbad / Seven Sages of Rome-Narrative

The Sindbad / Seven Sages of Rome-material is the most famous premodern narrative tradition of which nobody has ever heard. Told in at least 30 languages from Persia to Iceland over more than 10 centuries, the story cycle recounts a medieval #me-too story of a false rape accusation between a mute prince and his young stepmother at a royal court, and the impossibility of establishing the truth. As such, it is one of the most popular works of medieval and early modern literature. The modest amount of scholarly attention that the tradition has received remains fragmentary, and almost exclusively linked to modern national languages. This also means that the unique insights into the cultural diversity and intercultural communication embedded in this narrative tradition have been mostly overlooked. To meet this deficiency, recent collaborative research projects which the speaker takes part in argue for a renewed comparative philological, literary, and cultural analysis. In this context, a data base has been created that for the first time contains all known textual witnesses: https://db.seven-sages-of-rome.org/Main_Page. Participants are encouraged to brouse the data base in preparation for the workshop. 

Jutta Eming is a professor of medieval German literature at the Institute for German and Netherlandic Philology, Freie Universität Berlin since 2010. From 2007-2009, she was Assistant Professor in Medieval German Studies at UBC Vancouver. 

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