Maxims in Old English Poetry (review)

190 Reviews Cavill, Paul, Maxims in Old English Poetry, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 19 cloth; pp. x, 205; R.R.P. £45.00, US$75.00. Maxims, or 'sententious generalisations', occur frequently throughou extant corpus of Old English verse, and four poems are devoted exclusively to listing these conventional and formulaic expressions of wisdom. M a n y maxims are memorable, if only for their unprovocative simplicity ('frost must freeze'; 'every mouth needs food') or their encoded social information ('woman belongs at her embroidery'; 'wise words are fitting in everyone'). The proliferation of maxims suggests that this lastmentioned idea, the universal propriety of wise speech, was popular in the literate context of Anglo-Saxon England. John Cavill addresses the basic premises of this assumption, asking 'what are maxims, and why and h o w are they used?'. These poems and extracts have received relatively little critical attention, and John Cavill's book is the first full-length study to go significantly beyond commentary on the maxims. Cavill attempts to explain w h y the Anglo-Saxons preserved lists of wise sayings, and to examine their social and rhetorical purpose and value. Using the tools of oral-formulaic theory, proverb performance theory, and the sociology of knowledge, Cavill argues that these texts had a precise cultural and literary place in the construction of the Anglo-Saxon world view. They articulate basic truths in a given society, but more importantly, play a role in creating social reality. Maxims, Cavill argues, arrange 'thought and experience into hierarchies, probabilities and patterns' (p. 14), and thereby provide a social context of meaning. By articulating familiar assumptions as unalterable truth, the maxims perpetuate the conventional and create a specific framework for interpreting the world. This is a coherent and persuasive rationale for the otherwise puzzling existence of these seemingly flat poems and expressions which some scholars believe do little more than preserve and transmit knowledge. In his discussion on the social purpose of these texts, Cavill borrows the term 'nomic' from sociology (the 'ordering of thought and experience by means of a belief system', p. 10) and distinguishes it from the usual descriptor of the maxim, 'gnomic' ('expressing what is c o m m o n l y k n o w n and understood', p. 24). H e differentiates the maxim, or gnome, from the proverb and the riddle, though he does not provide a full definition and Reviews 191 prescriptive limits of the maxim until the end of Chapter Two, working with 'sententious generalisation' up to that point. Most essential to the maxim are the use of present-tense verbs and a flexible, or general application (i.e. no deictic referents). Proverbs, on the other hand, can be used metaphorically, on the basis of their structured parallelism. His discussion of the rhetorical value of gnomic utterances in nongnomic poems as 'emphatic discourse markers' (p. 81) is particularly interesting. Here, Cavill maintains that maxims were so conventional and distinctly recognisable that their presence in a poetic text signalled rhetorical usage. H e perceives a shared assumption of the conventional between the writer and recipient of the text which operates in the textual creation of meaning. The m a x i m can be used for the purposes of characterisation or to indicate an ideal from which the particular situation at hand deviates. Cavill also distinguishes the maxim proper from the 'applied' maxim, where the situation and agent are specific, not general. In this book, Old English maxims are situated in the context of a wider tradition of wisdom literature in Germanic cultures, though perhaps Cavill overstates the case w h e n he says that 'for the Old Germanic races, it appears that nothing was so useful as a general maxim' (p. 40). O n a more technical level, he examines the metrical structures of gnomic sayings in Old English, and concludes that they are homogeneous and vernacular rather than Latin in essence, even though they more often communicate Christian than pre-Christian ideas. Indeed, the cosmic coherence enunciated in Christian ideology provides the overriding context for the assumptions behind the maxims, where all activity in the world is moderated by an overseeing deity. In...