Authority in Middle English Proverb Literature

Abstract

Proverbs are one method by which an ideology can be taught. They are pithy, memorable phrases and sentences that encapsulate guidance for behaviour in ethical situations or a particular view of the way the world functions or ought to function. If an individual saying becomes proverbial, it becomes part of the "common sense" and ideology of the culture in which it is used, a means by which people can be made to behave and perceive according to verbal reflexes, without recourse to thought (Cram 90-92). But if any piece of language is to affect the way people think and behave, it has to have authority. Folk proverbs carry their own authority within themselves. They do not need a source attribution for their validity; if everyone in the speech community recognises them as 'proverbial,' then the tradition behind them in itself gives them authority. Political and religious institutions, especially authoritarian ones, have long been aware of the power of the proverb to influence behaviour. In the medieval church, this acknowledgment sometimes took the form of the collection of popular proverbs by the clergy for the use of all, and at other times was manifested in the use of vernacular proverbs in the text of Latin sermons (Wenzel 80). But another possible reaction is to create new 'proverbs' which are more conducive to the ideology of the institution, in contrast to the undependable and sometimes ambiguous morality of folk proverbs, either by composing them or by finding them in written sources. Dictators like Mao Zedong have attempted to proverbialise their own sayings, which the populace is forcibly taught to mouth and bear in mind, so that it will behave and perceive in ways that are acceptable to authority. There is evidence that the English church also attempted to create its own body of proverbs during the Middle English period, for a substantial body of literature survives from that time which consists of lists of proverbial advice. Much of this literature appears to be an attempt to make use of the concept of the proverb, which had an oral tradition that went back to pre-literate, and pre-Christian times, but in a way more reliably conducive to a world-view and behaviour consistent with Christian dogma. These sayings were not really proverbial in the traditional sense, but more like direct, straight-forward instruction or advice. However, they seem nevertheless to have been regarded as 'proverbs' at the time, whether they originated with the church or not (Louis). In any case, because the new proverbs lacked the automatic authority of popular proverbs, they had to be framed in contexts which attempted to substitute a different kind of moral authority for the 'proverbial' utterances. These legitimising contexts were basically three: the domestic circumstance of a parent instructing a child; the more public situation of a ruler or philosopher instructing the people; and florilegia-like collections in which numerous utterances are attributed to various figures of history.