(“The Book of Sindbad”), a cycle of stories, presumably Indian in origin, that made its way through Middle Persian and Arabic into Western lore. In the frame story, an Oriental king entrusted the education of his son to a wise tutor named Sindbad (not to be confused with the sailor of The Thousandand One Nights). During a week when the prince was ordered by Sindbad to maintain silence, his stepmother tried to seduce him. Having failed, she tried to accuse the prince before the king and sought to bring about his death by relating seven stories. Each of her narratives, however, was confuted by seven sages, who in turn told tales of the craft of women. The prince’s lips were at last unsealed and the truth was exposed.
The oldest surviving text of the story is in Middle Arabic and is included in The Thousand and One Nights (nights 578–606 in Sir Richard Burton’s translation, vol. 6, 1886). The Arabic text gave rise to Hebrew, Syrian, and Spanish translations (13th century); the Greek version (11th century) is derived from the Syrian. Of the Persian versions the most important is that of al-Samarqandī (12th century). The tales entered Latin via the Greek version, in the 12th century, under the title Dolopathos, which was translated into French. The German, English, French, and Spanish chapbooks of the cycle are generally based on a Latin original.
The history of the seven masters of Rome, which had been published before the Reformation, was issued in a revised version in 1576 as a moral story for the ignorant, in the belief that ‘pleasing allurements of tales and fables’ would help their souls become ‘quicker sighted’. In the story the emperor (signifying the world) has one son (man) and tries to bring him up well, but the son loses his mother (‘reason or divine grace’) and falls into the hand of his bewitching wicked stepmother (sin). A star from heaven warns the son to avoid sin, and he is also given advice by the seven wise masters of the title, who represents the seven liberal sciences; as a result he defeats sin and wins a rich crown of glory and happiness. Readers were told that if they made right use of this moral, it would provide a rich banquet to their souls. The elements of fairy story, the parallels with romantic works like Richard Johnson’s The seven champions of Christendome (and later Thomas Howard’s History of the seven wise mistresses of Rome), and its publication in black-letter type, with ‘many pretty pictures’ in later editions, all perhaps help to explain the enduring popularity of this work, which had reached its twenty-fifth edition by 1700. In 1673, when Francis Kirkman was describing the purchases of a fictitious son of a London merchant, the Seven wise masters was the second book mentioned. In Ireland too, he said in the preface to another work, the Seven wise masters was used as a first reading book for children, and many were said to have learnt to read well as a result. ‘so great is the pleasure that young and old take in the reading thereof’.
Source:
Seven Wise Masters. (2009). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved July 29, 2009, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/536547/Seven-Wise-Masters
I. M. Green. (2000). In Print and Protestantism in early modern England. (chapter 7 section vi p. 421). Retrieved July 29, 2009 from http://books.google.com/books?id=G9YIlrlacgMC&pg=PT444&lpg=PT444&dq=Seven+Wise+Masters+moral&source=bl&ots=xvEfM3yKRV&sig=X2sUeXllddV6VcvBFBnoe9zIW-M&hl=en&ei=ud5vSve3No6BkQWh1rzJBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1
