The Seven Sages of Rome

Medium Aevum, Spring-Summer, 2008 by Margaret Connolly

The Seven Sages of Rome (Midland Version), ed. Jill Whitelock, Early English Text Society, OS 324 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). lxxx 182 pp. ISBN o-19-722327-3. 45.00 [pounds sterling]. This is not the first edition of The Seven Sages of Rome, a framed story collection containing fifteen tales of wicked women and wise counsellors, whose Northern and Southern versions have previously been edited by Campbell (1907) and Brunner (1935) respectively. Jill Whitelock's edition is not even the first of the Midland version, extant only in Cambridge University Library MS Dd.1.17, though this version's limited availability only through Wright's Percy Society edition (1845) justifies her description of it as 'most neglected' (p. vii). What Whitelock does offer, however, is the first full edition and study of the Midland version anal its relationship with the other Middle English versions, an undertaking in line with the current appreciation of the value of different refractions of the same text; incidentally, these include a prose version (IPMEP 613) which would repay more editorial attention.

In the description of the manuscript more consistency is needed in the identification of the language of the texts, but the account of the volume's collation is as full as one could wish, including a sharp-eyed itemizing of the worn quire and leaf signatures which spots some overlooked by other scholars who have worked on this manuscript recently. Useful summaries of the seven manuscripts which contain other versions of the text (the so-called 'Y-group') are provided, though the long and ultimately inconclusive discussion of the Y-group stemma might have been curtailed. The space allocated to consideration of the text's complex and layered language is justified since a Mischsprache such as this raises interesting editorial problems. Whitelock's response to this is rather disappointing as she declines to emend the text, even on metrical grounds. With only one manuscript of a verse text that has several cousins and which demonstrably derives from an Old French original, this policy of light emendation seems a bit feeble. This revised version of Whitelock's Ph.D. thesis sometimes betrays its origins as in, for example, some rather heavy footnoting in the introduction, where I noticed one error: on p. xiv there are two footnote references numbered '7', but only one corresponding footnote. [Margaret Connolly]