French Version A: Roman des Sept Sages

From The Seven Sages of Rome
  1. Home
  2. Secondary Version
  3. French Version A: Roman des Sept Sages

The Old French prose Version A is the presumed origin for most other Version A redactions in other languages. The text was composed in the first quarter of the 13th century (Foehr-Janssens 1994, p. 432), and exists in more than twenty manuscripts (see below).

Significant variation occurs across these manuscripts. For example, a sub-group of manuscripts, including BNF fr. 2137, show remnants of versification in the final four stories; these are critically designated Version A2. Other groupings, including the letter groups shown below, were developed by Runte for use in his online edition of the French Version A. These groups signal textual similarity, and all manuscripts within a given group are highly similar (/potentially copies of the same texts).

Version A is also closely related to Version L; the two traditions are essentially identical for the first 11 stories, before L differs dramatically, omitting several stories and instead including Filia and Noverca. However, a significant number of manuscripts that closely follow the text and pattern of Version A, and are designated as such by most contemporary scholarship, also contain one or both of the additional Version L stories, Filia and Noverca. This marked distinction demonstrates the cross-pollenation betweek A and L, and shows how closely and constantly interlinked the manuscript composition of these traditions must have been. Because these manuscripts are so distinct from the other A texts, and because recent pieces of scholarship (Runte, Coco, Foehr-Janssens, Speer, the Arlima database, etc.) soemtimes group them in different ways, they do not appear in the manuscript-list below, and instead have been grouped into the French A/L Overlap version, together with the anomalous L texts.

General Information

Language within Version
Old French
Parent Versions
A (Seven Sages)
Child Versions
Group U, Group V, Group W, Group X, Group Y, Group Z
Title
Roman des Sept Sages
Branch of the tradition
Seven Sages of Rome

Language & Composition

Language of version
Old French


Date of Composition
1201 - 1225 (555AH) (999AM)
Source for date of composition
Speer (1989), Foehr-Janssens (1994)

Literature & Editions

Modern research literature
Coco (2016), Runte, Society of the Seven Sages Portal (2014), Runte, Wikeley, Farrell (1984), Berne-Aïache (1966), Foehr-Janssens (1994), Le Roux de Lincy (1838), Speer (1981), Speer (1987), Speer & Foehr-Janssens (2017), Speer (1989), Speer (1994), Kelly (1978), Niedzielski (1978)
Modern Editions
Runte, Les sept sages de Rome: An On-Line Edition of French Version A (2006), Plomp, De Middelnederlandsche bewerking van het gedicht van den VII Vroeden van binnen Rome (1899), Coco, Il Roman des sept sages (2016), Aïache-Berne, Les Versions françaises en prose du Roman des Sept Sages (1966)

Recorded Branch of This Secondary Version

{{#if:

Adaptations

Adapted from (version)
A (Seven Sages)
Adapted into (version)
French A/L Overlap



Pattern of Embedded Stories in This Version

Connected Manuscripts








Retrieved from "https://db.seven-sages-of-rome.org/index.php?title=French_Version_A:_Roman_des_Sept_Sages&oldid=14913"
This page was last edited on 18 February 2026, at 13:25.
Privacy policy
About The Seven Sages of Rome
Disclaimers