Proverb Tradition as a Soft Source for the Canterbury Tales

Proverb Tradition as a Soft Source for the Canterbury Tales Nancy Mason Bradbury Smith College The original call for papers posed to this panel a series of questions, among them, whether our discipline sustains ‘‘a hierarchy of sources, privileging textual over visual, written over oral, Latin over English , ‘hard’ over ‘soft.’’’ In this brief essay, I use the example of proverb tradition to reflect on the largely unexplored potential of the ‘‘soft source’’ to serve as a middle term between, at one extreme, the privileging of empirically demonstrable ‘‘hard sources’’ over all other kinds of textual relations, and, at the other, the rejection of traditional source study altogether on the postmodernist grounds that one vast intertext connects all texts equally. As the first new Sources and Analogues volume and the contributions to this symposium demonstrate, between these poles lies a whole spectrum of fresh approaches to the study of Chaucer’s raw materials.1 In the second paper of this symposium, Peter G. Beidler suggests that we distinguish between a hard source, ‘‘a specific work for which we have an extant copy and that we know, from verbal similarities, character names, and plot sequences, that Chaucer used,’’ and a soft source, for which Chaucer’s knowledge of the material is not in question, but where the influence on his work may be more ‘‘general’’ or ‘‘distant.’’ Beidler’s hard source is familiar to us all from centuries of source study: a traditional source text must be temporally prior, accessible to the writer in question, and demonstrably influential on his or her work, the ideal form of evidence being close and extended verbal parallels. Boccaccio’s Teseida is a recognized hard source for The Knight’s Tale. As I propose to use the term, however, what best distinguishes a soft source is not that 1 Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, eds. Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 1 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2002). PAGE 237 237 ................. 16094$ CH12 11-01-10 14:04:35 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER its influence on Chaucer’s work is general or distant, but rather that it need not be a single written text. A soft source might be a pictorial image, cultural practice, oral tradition, set of conventions, or real event, but the soft source as I conceive of it leaves a distinct verbal imprint on the work in question to indicate its special relevance. In the absence of this distinct imprint, I see little benefit in treating the material as a source at all, as opposed to a context or background or other ‘‘general’’ or ‘‘distant’’ influence. By admitting that it is not hard, my proposed soft source acknowledges the traditional criteria for source study, but, as a source, it nevertheless takes its place among the identifiable materials out of which Chaucer crafted his work. In answer to the question with which I began—do hard, single-text sources stand in hierarchical relation to soft in contemporary Chaucer studies?—I can only say that for myself and a number of other participants in this symposium, it is the so-called soft sources that at this moment seem to present the freshest and most promising new ways of thinking about the poet’s raw materials. Traditional source study has been devoted disproportionately, it now seems, to mapping Chaucer’s reception of major literary texts. Rather than pitting soft against hard or traditional sources, however, or debating about terminology, I want instead to sketch out the case for the importance of a particular source. Soft sources are often ill-suited to representation in Sources and Analogues volumes; the tale-by-tale organization of both the old and the new editions makes it hard to register even so vastly influential a soft source as medieval proverb tradition, the example to which I devote my essay. Why proverb tradition? Proverbs play a variety of important roles in the Canterbury Tales.2 They are affirmed, denied, revered, ridiculed, and ignored at one’s peril; they occur in nearly every tale, and even their absence can be significant. Many scholars regard the Thopas-Melibee pair2 Studies of individual proverbs...