Proverbial Material in the Late French Epic of Tristan de Nanteuil

Abstract

THE German school of philologists at the end of last century published several monographs on proverbs in the epic, fabliaux, courtly romance, and dramatic genres. studies were milestones in the field of paroemiology, but were incomplete, being based only on printed material. Old French lyric poetry and the hagiographies were not screened.1 Several fourteenth-century writers were subsequently shown by Professor B. J. Whiting to be fruitful transmitters of proverbs. In spite of all these important contributions, he was still able to write in 1935 The study of mediaeval proverbs is, as yet, in its infancy,2 and although his own studies inspired others to follow suit, the greater hope he cherished of seeing one day a comprehensive dictionary of O.F. proverbs is no nearer reality.3 One regrets that modern editors continually fail to highlight proverbial material, when all that is needed is an asterisk in the glossaries, or better still, a section or appendix devoted to the proverbs.4 Moreover, scores of texts still await editors. Few, indeed, are the scholars today who are prepared to screen them in manuscript. As far as the epic genre is concerned, the late chansons de geste were almost all omitted from the early monographs, as few were in print. Since the beginning of this century, the proverbial material in the Batard de Bouillon, Baudouin de Sebourc, and Dieudonne de Hongrie was brought to the notice of scholars by the fine analyses of Professors E. R. Labande and L. F. Flutre.5 No detailed studies have been made of the decasyllabic and alexandrine redactions, mainly fourteenth