Hating Women in the Middle English Seven Sages of Rome

Abstract This article re-examines woman hating in the Middle English Seven Sages of Rome. It traces the increasingly misogynist presentation of the Seven Sages materials as they pass from western Asia, through French, and into English. It also proposes that we reread the text’s misogyny within the context of its broader design. In the poem, misogynist statements can always be attributed either to the sages or to the text’s narrator, whose voice mixes with that of his male protagonists. Focusing on the narrative frame as well as four of the sages’ tales—tentamina, inclusa, avis, and vidua, the sages’ stories of the tests, the recluse, the bird, and the widow—I argue that the text undermines the authority of the narrator as well as the sages. The argument is undergirded by the observation that the earliest extant copy of the poem survives in the Auchinleck Manuscript, a book often associated with female patronage; special attention is afforded to the text of that copy. Throughout, I draw on feminist scholarship on the French, Latin, and German Seven Sages. My global aim is to relaunch the Middle English poem as a text worthy of consideration by scholars of Middle English literature interested in east-to-west cultural transfer, gender politics, and exemplification.