Proverbia Septentrionalia: Essays on Proverbs in Medieval Scandinavian and English Literature by Michael Cichon, and Yin Liu (review)

The title of this volume seems something of a misnomer. Its various essays move beyond proverbs per se and engage with wisdom literature more generally, touching on proverb-like statements, sententiae, and gnomic writing from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries. Perhaps the title ought to have acknowledged this wider scope. Two of the contributions, those of Susan Deskis and Carolyne Larrington, while authoritative and interesting, deal with Old English and Scandinavian gnomic poetry. The identification with proverbs is imperfect.

This, however, reflects the difficulty of defining proverbs and specifying how they function in oral and written culture. (The first chapter, by Richard Harris, gives a helpful history and overview of approaches to this problem.) Proverbs are distinguished not only by a characteristic structure but also by how people deploy them in speech and writing, and by the fact they are in widespread use. When confronted by a proverb-like statement, something possibly unique within surviving medieval literature, can one be certain it is genuinely a proverb, not just a pithy observation? Even statements that claim to be proverbs ('As the people say […]') cannot be implicitly trusted. As several essays note, religious and secular authorities sometimes sought to empower their statements by endowing them with supposed proverbial status.

Proverbia Septentrionalia originated as a multi-disciplinary colloquium in 2011 that explored how proverbial studies—paroemiology—might best be undertaken. Several contributors propose their own innovations when it comes to studying proverbs. Richard Harris suggests that the medieval prevalence of proverbs reflected 'paroemial cognitive patterning' in preliterate societies (p. 20), whereby thinking had a proverb-like structure. Joseph Harris categorizes proverbs as 'normal-grade' (cited in a text), 'extended-grade' (used to provide a work's structure), or 'zero-grade' (alluded to but without citation). Larrington proposes that the techniques of narratology and situational ethics might productively be applied to analysis of wisdom literature.

Other chapters are more straightforward case studies: of proverbs on a particular theme (talking skins, for example), of specific sets of proverbs, or of their appearance in individual works, such as Egils saga, collections of Icelandic exempla, or the poetry of the Gawain-poet. Janken Myrdal trawls the fourteenth-century proverb anthology of Peder Låle for insights it may yield into medieval agriculture. There is a close reading by Jeanine De Landtsheer of the ways in which Erasmus's thoughts, as these appeared in the 1515 iteration of his Adagia, informed the views he expressed the following year in his Institutio principis Christiani.

Two chapters on different forms of 'sentential turn' (to adopt Russell Poole's formulation) might be characterized as exhibitions of proverbs' cultural mobility. Poole suggests that Icelandic skald Sigvatr Þórðarson contracted his fondness for sentential writing whilst on embassy to England, where there was seemingly 'a predilection for aphoristic statements' around that time (p. 134). In the blended, Anglo-Norse culture of Cnut's court, Poole concludes, this literary vogue might readily have jumped from Old English to Icelandic. (It seems fitting that England's most proverbial monarch should have been involved.) Andrew Taylor investigates why fourteenth-century social elites, such as merchants, started compiling proverb collections: proverbs were no longer customary oral consensus; they now represented 'potted wisdom for social climbers' (p. 149). Chaucer, Taylor suggests, may have been 'ironizing a particular kind of shallow gentility' (p. 151) when he had individuals in his poems quote proverbs.

The book's chapters are held together by recurring motifs: individual sayings ('One cannot save the doomed'); primary texts (Hávamál; Egils saga); important secondary scholarship. The contributors' arguments, too, often run parallel: the significance of where proverbs are situated within a given text; the difficulty of deciding whether something is a proverb or not; the role of proverbs as speech acts that...