The Seven Sages at Sea

Abstract

This essay studies the transmission of framed narratives in the medieval Mediterranean, focusing on a narrative tradition that was at once immensely popular, particularly complex, and poorly documented: theSeven Sages of Rome1 (known as theBook of Sindbadin the Eastern Mediterranean). Using the scholarship of political geographers and political scientists on territoriality, frontiers, and the ‘New Medievalism,’ and two theories borrowed from mathematics—fuzzy sets and game theory, the essay examines one story from theSeven Sagesin particular: the last tale told in the western versions of the work, known as ‘Vaticinium.’ The essay contributes to the development of a scholarly methodology able to describe transmission histories so complex that previous philological studies have had difficulty accounting for them in their entirety.

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