Proverbial Wisdom in the Ysengrimus

FROM antiquity to the present day, proverbs have formed an important part of oral culture. So deeply are they embedded in our habits of thought and speech that we take them largely for granted, focusing on their existence only, say, when we wish to find in our own linguistic usages something comparable to the oral formulaic tradition. Tied to no particular class or social group, proverbs embody a popular wisdom, based on the assumption of a common, shared experience, endlessly to be repeated and renewed. Absorbing proverbs as part of the native tongue, we later discover at one and the same time their aptness for the individual situations of our own lives and the comforting assurance that such situations have been similarly experienced by countless others. Individual experience is thus both sustained by the recognition of this pool of common experience to which the proverbs testify, and itself contributes to its increase, justifying the proverbs anew. The force of a proverbial formulation, therefore, derives in the last resort from its appeal to experience; even if it is a particular system of thought or belief that throws up an axiom or exhortation in the first place, its proverbial form assumes its enfranchisement from such a system, its transfer to a realm where its only support is the speaker's willingness to match it with experience and find justification for its use. Proverbs must always have had this role in the oral traditionindeed, one might see it as the condition of their survival. But in the Middle Ages they also had an important role in written tradition. Both biblical and classical literature provided models for the embodiment of traditional wisdom in the form of the proverb collection: on the one hand, the Solomonic books of the Bible-Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus;' on the other, the Distichs of Cato and the collection of maxims culled from the works of Publilius Syrus.2 Such collections, as is well known, occupied an important position in medieval education; Cato's Distichs were used as a first Latin reader for students who had mastered the basics of Latin grammar. With similarly pedagogic aims in view, medieval writers compiled their own Latin proverb collections, either by a relatively mechanical excerpting from classical authors, in the manner of the ubiquitous florilegia, or by a more independent recasting of traditional sayings. Egbert of

Epistemology · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy

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