A connected medieval literary world : The Seven Sages of Rome in Late-Medieval Europe

Various versions of the Seven Sages of Rome, a collection of medieval stories, were produced throughout Europe and the Near East during the Middle Ages and early modern period. The main objective of this project is to incite reflection about the connectedness of the medieval literary world, by visualizing the diffusion of texts across time and space.

The first aim of this project was to collect information regarding the extant copies of the Seven Sages of Rome by completing the information about manuscripts and prints available on the online Arlima literary Archive with further research into other sources. The collected information was digitally organised, before being used to produce visualizations (graphs displaying in which languages the prints and manuscripts were produced, as well as static and timelapse maps) which reflect how texts of the Seven Sages of Rome were transmitted. Finally, the visual information was made accessible through a website, which any interested user can use as a tool to download the collected information, bring modifications to it, and produce new updated visualizations.