Rival Wisdoms: Reading Proverbs in the Canterbury Tales

Nancy Mason Bradbury has done the nearly impossible in twenty-first-century scholarship on medieval literature: write a scholarly monograph on a topic on which no scholarly monograph already exists, and on The Canterbury Tales no less. The most recent book on proverbs in Chaucer's works is Bartlett Jere Whiting's 1934 Chaucer's Use of Proverbs, which collects proverbs and other proverbial materials, as defined and identified by Whiting, offering light commentary and no critical argument to speak of. Bradbury appropriately builds on Whiting's valuable work but, importantly, presents the first book-length study of proverbs in The Canterbury Tales with a sustained critical argument and extensive textual analysis.Throughout the Middle Ages, the proverb was an enormously popular and wide-spread genre or, rather, microgenre on account of its brevity, grouped by scholars with such other short forms as the charm or the joke. Cherished for its diverse content, flexible deployability, sharp wit, guidance on wide-ranging matters, and memorability, the proverb genre was used in the medieval schoolroom to teach Latin while instilling edifying rules for life in young learners (pp. 12–13). But medieval people across all social classes would learn proverbs from diverse sources, including through oral transmission, giving these compact but powerful expressions the ability to travel across class and educational boundaries (p. 20). The popularity of proverbs can consistently be traced from ancient sources through early and later medieval literatures and into Early Modern times. Though Bradbury acknowledges that Chaucer works in a tradition (p. 8), she takes Early Modern readers’ interest in Chaucerian proverbs and thus their reception as a starting point and model for her reading of The Canterbury Tales. Combined with her reliance on Erasmus of Rotterdam's writings on the proverb (ca. 1466–1536; his Adagiorum chiliades was first published in 1500), this results in a study that decidedly looks forward from Chaucer rather than to the tradition as he receives it. Her goal is to show that “reading proverbially leads to the discovery of new patterns and emphases in the Canterbury Tales” (p. 41) and that certain inherent qualities of the proverb and “Chaucer's skill in wielding it render this tiny microgenre potent, disruptive, and sometimes even incendiary” (p. 42).The introduction (pp. 1–9) lays out the book's main argument that “a proverb-conscious encounter” (p. 2) with The Canterbury Tales leads to new insights, even for a work with already vast scholarship. Bradbury employs the “vanished” (p. 1) and “now-alien” (p. 2) premodern reading practice that deliberately seeks out proverbs and other wisdom expressions to create meaning in texts. As a guide to identifying proverbs in The Canterbury Tales serves Thomas Speght's 1602 printing of Chaucer's works, in which Speght inserts marginal manicules that mark “sentences and proverbes” (p. 11). Paying attention to these passages, Bradbury argues, reveals both Chaucer's own awareness of the enormous power of the proverb and the proverb's capacity to act for good or for harm in a narrative, to positively expand or negatively constrict a story's possible meanings (pp. 3–4). This method's larger critical value is to recognize “some larger issues about how meaning was made in premodern fiction” (p. 2).Chapter 1, “Proverbs and Premodern Reading Practices” (pp. 10–42), deals with both premodern reading practices and the theoretical underpinnings of Bradbury's project. Premodern people highly valued proverbs and wisdom in their literature, including in fiction, and read texts with an eye towards proverbial content that could advise and educate and also be excerpted for later study and use. Chaucer was almost immediately seen as a rich source of proverbial wisdom, and his prolific use of proverbs lends itself to a “proverb-conscious reading” (p. 13). Bradbury isolates three formal properties that make this microgenre ideal for embedding in longer texts, especially a work with genres and storytellers as diverse as those of The Canterbury Tales: “exceptional brevity, well-defined yet voice-permeable boundaries, and a self-contained completeness of meaning, the last a key property for opening up the text it inhabits to new perspectives and alternative worldviews” (p. 37). These properties also speak to the theorists that inform Bradbury's project. She draws on the writings of Erasmus, an avid collector and promoter of the proverb “as a compact yet vigorously expansive literary powerhouse” (p. 15); on Mikhail Bakhtin's work on genre and voice, which poses that an “utterance,” in Bradbury's case the proverb, is marked by “well-defined and yet voice-permeable boundaries that separate them from the speech or writing around them” (p. 38) but allow the surrounding voice of the proverb user to infuse additional meaning into the utterance, giving it, according to Bakhtin, a “special semantic fullness of value” (quoted on p. 40); on Kenneth Burke, who considers proverbs as “strategies for dealing with situations” (quoted on p. 23, emphases in original); and on Walter Benjamin, who attributes to proverbs “a kind of magical character: they transform the situation” (quoted on p. 24).Readers expecting a definition of the “proverb” (about which proverb scholars are frequently asked) will be disappointed. Bradbury sensibly forgoes this notoriously thorny issue, pointing out instead, along with other scholars, that it is more important that medieval readers and listeners perceived an expression as a proverb rather than whether it fulfills specific definitional criteria. Similarly, proverbs are often described as “traditional” and “current,” but medieval proverbs cannot always be proved to come from a traditional origin (whether learned, popular, or other) or to have already been current in Chaucer's time. Generally, the “origins” of proverbs in premodern sources are difficult to ascertain (cf. pp. 19–21), not least because of the accidental survival of texts. Chaucer also likely invented proverbs; his works are often the earliest attested sources for now well-established English sayings (for example, a version of “Far from the Eye, far from the heart” in Troilus 4.414) (p. 37).Chapter 2, “The Rival Wisdoms of Clerks and Cherles” (pp. 43–83), presents the first pair of the “rival wisdoms” of the book's title. Analyzing proverb use in the Miller's, the Reeve's, the Friar's, the Summoner's, and the Canon's Yeoman's tales, Bradbury argues that the clerks and cherles of The Canterbury Tales engage in a verbal quiting through proverbs, each group presenting their own version of wisdom as they take position on the subject matters of individual tales. As the cherles use diversely sourced proverbs to oppose the largely Solomonic wisdom of the clerks, each contrasting perspective is shown to have legitimacy and a claim to truth, but neither perspective is complete by itself. Through the use of proverbs, “a struggle [unfolds] over what constitutes wisdom and whose wisdom matters” (p. 57). The cherles successfully challenge the seemingly dominant and unquestioned validity of clerical wisdom, making room for new worldviews and wisdoms. The coexistence of rival wisdoms is also reflected in the mixed reaction to the Miller's Tale, expressed in the proverb, “Diverse folk diversely they seyde” (I.3857). This line is a version of the Latin Quot homines, tot sententiae (cf. “As many heddes, as manye wittes ther been” V.203), which Chaucer deploys in four different vernacular versions, attesting to the expressive value he attributed to it. The proverb also reflects, early on in The Canterbury Tales, the diversity of tales, their tellers, and their possible intentions (p. 72) and prepares readers for the work's overall lesson that warns, as Bradbury asserts, against allowing a single moralite to prevail or one wisdom to count as worthier than another (p. 168).The second pair of rival wisdoms pits clerks against women in chapter 3, “The Rival Wisdoms of Clerks and Women” (pp. 84–124), with analysis centering on the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. Bradbury argues that Alison of Bath “serves as a proverb-disputing and proverb-dispensing feminine wisdom figure, a controversial anti-Solomon” (p. 85), who, like the cherles of the previous chapter, challenges the monopoly of clerical wisdom. In the Prologue, the Wife's dense clusters of proverbs push back against the antifeminist tradition and male voices by presenting an alternative to the Solomonic wisdom that seeks to oppress women. Her litany of antifeminist sayings is permeated by her voice (pace Bakhtin), allowing readers to recognize her opposing views filtered through them. Her tale, with additional proverbs, envisions a world of reshaped gender relations, in which a woman functions as an accepted wisdom figure who “succeeds in rescripting masculine language and behavior from abuse of women to support for feminine self-determination” (p. 92). Bradbury presents an appealing and convincing reading of the proverb use, though a potential contradiction emerges in her reading of the Wife/women as internalizing and thus enacting the objectionable behaviors of which they are accused in the relentlessly repeated antifeminist proverbs while also describing the Wife as strategically reappropriating these same denigrations with a positive value (pp. 114–15).Chapter 4, “Proverb and Story in the Tale of Melibee” (pp. 125–56), diverges from the theme of rival wisdoms by discussing the role of proverbs in storytelling. The Melibee is commonly viewed as largely unsuccessful as a story, a sort of insult added to injury since both Sir Thopas and Melibee are ascribed to Pilgrim Chaucer, whom one might wish to dazzle readers with his storytelling skills. Bradbury argues that searching for story in Melibee is misreading it; a proverb-conscious reading of the tale recognizes that the proverbs, not the story, are “the main event” (p. 126). The tale must be read as a proverb collection that intentionally presents an abundance of sayings, including contradictory ones, which is all part of Prudence's pedagogy as she “seeks to equip Melibeus with the tools he will need to exercise his ‘free choys’ and his deliberative powers without her prompting” (p. 147). In this way, Melibee then also complements Thopas perfectly: the coupling represents the “raw materials from which [Chaucer] crafted his mature work: the lively vernacular storytelling tradition of English verse romance in one case and the voluminously learned international fund of ‘sentences and proverbes’ in the other” (p. 131). In the end, both tales are perfectly fitting for Chaucer as their teller.The conclusion (pp. 157–74) offers further analysis of two pairs of tales: the Manciple's and Parson's tales and the Monk's and Nun's Priest's tales. Extending the discussion of the previous chapter, Bradbury's final task is to determine the role of proverbs in Chaucer's “implicit ars poetica” in The Canterbury Tales by understanding better what the work says about the relationship of proverb and story (p. 158). Considering the proverb's transformative power, how can an author harness the most useful effects of this form without letting it overpower a reader's own understanding of the text? The answer, to Bradbury, lies in Chaucer's paired tales. The Manciple's Tale insists on a single moralite, “hammered home by eight ‘sentences and proverbes’” (p. 160), regardless of a resulting mismatch between proverb and story. This contrasts with the Parson's Tale, in which proverb and story work together, leaving room for the reader's interpretation (p. 162). Most informative about the role of proverbs is the pairing of the Monk's Tale and Nun's Priest's Tale. The essential lines at the end of the latter tale are its well-known moral, explicitly stated in a proverb: “Taketh the moralite . . . / Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille” (VII.3440, 3443). In other words, the point is not to have a single moralite but to be able to deliberate on counsel received, decide what is most fruitful, and discard the useless (p. 172). This encapsulates the cumulative effect of all proverbs embedded throughout The Canterbury Tales. By giving readers a choice, Bradbury concludes, “tellers like Chaucer and his many pilgrim speakers meet some of the challenges posed by the subjectivity of the ‘diverse folk’ who hear or read their stories” (p. 174).Bradbury successfully makes visible the critical value of a corpus of hundreds of texts embedded in The Canterbury Tales that has yet to be fully examined. She reveals how essential the proverb is for constructing what scholars have long considered to be salient features of the Tales: the diversity of genres; diverse cast of characters and storytellers; wide range of subject matters; authentic voicing of members of various social classes; conflicts, rivalries, and discussions among the many demographics represented; and more. Bradbury brilliantly shows us that proverbs, in one way or another, are tied to all of them and their poetic shaping. Along the way, she helpfully provides readers with suitable tools and methods for reading proverbs in medieval texts. All this makes for a learned, innovative, well-rounded, and satisfying scholarly study overall. It is the more surprising, therefore, that Bradbury made no use of the Thesaurus Proverbiorum Medii Aevi, a thirteen-volume collection of medieval proverbs attested in European vernaculars and Latin. If “Melibee testifies to the riches of the international proverb tradition, that great unsung source for Chaucer's poetry” (p. 152; cf. also p. 131), as Bradbury asserts, drawing on this invaluable and comprehensive resource could have strengthened her arguments by showing just how much Chaucer was writing in a dynamic, multilingual tradition, spanning all of medieval western Europe linguistically and geographically and representing many centuries of literary production (Bradbury does mention the often trilingual learning of proverbs as part of the medieval curriculum: pp. 12–13). One particular treasure trove that Chaucer inherits is the corpus of vernacular English proverbs, also documented in the Thesaurus. Bradbury implies that the cherles discussed in chapter 2 learned their proverbs orally and in the vernacular since they are widely accessible to anyone without formal education (p. 44). Some consideration of how much Chaucer was indebted to the rich and well-documented vernacular proverb tradition going back to Old English (no Old English texts or proverbs are cited or indexed) might have added further texture and depth to Bradbury's readings of proverb use in the tales and, in particular, by the cherles.Rival Wisdoms is a readable and stimulating study that has much to offer for Chaucerians and other scholars who will surely feel invited to pay more attention to proverbs in the wider corpus of Middle English literature. It might enrich discussions in the classroom where proverb hunting and interpretation in a given tale's context could make for an animated lesson. The book is well-produced and carefully edited. I noticed only very few (inconsequential) errors, though one might have wished for a more consistent citing throughout of the promised Whiting numbers (pp. 5–6). Any Chaucerian and paremiologist will naturally be interested in this book but so should anyone with an interest in Genre Studies, literary short forms, medieval poetics, and folklore. One hopes that Bradbury's study, which models so well what can be gained by paying close critical attention to this popular medieval microgenre, will spur further research on this still underexplored topic.