Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:01.655)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Nancy Bradbury, Professor Emerita of English Language and Literature at Smith College. Dr. Bradbury, wonderful to have you here today.
Nancy Bradbury (00:15.886)
Thank you very much. Where do I get a hat like yours?
PJ (00:19.063)
I just have done like a very small run just for myself, but that's a good that's a good question You know, maybe that's the next step the the chasing Leviathan merch store But it won't thank you for coming on today and we're talking about your book rival wisdoms, it's a study of The pre -modern reading practices Proverbs and in especially in Chaucer Talk to me a little bit
Nancy Bradbury (00:23.022)
Thank you.
PJ (00:46.007)
I love the kind of the detail of this book. I love the specialization, but I also love its wider application. Talk to me a little bit about how you got onto this project. Why focus on this?
Nancy Bradbury (01:01.454)
Well, books come from other books, right? And I was inspired by a little book, a wonderful little book by an art historian, Walter Gibson. And it was called Figures of Speech, Picturing Proverbs in Renaissance Netherlands. And what impressed me about the book was that anyone who was interested in proverbs or interested, excuse me, in those northern,
Netherlandish painters could read this book. It was a short book. It started with the premise that we all hear proverbs every day, but we tend to apologize, especially if we're in a higher cultural setting, right? Like writing a serious book or giving a serious lecture. We apologize as the saying goes. And he's talked about the fact that
the attitude among these pre -modern painters that he was studying was completely different. And they loved proverbs and they found them full of wit and they found them amusing and they played with them in their paintings. And it made me think of Chaucer's play with proverbs. Just one quick example in the nun's priest's tale, it's chickens.
who are debating real proverbs. And you have this fictional married couple, a rooster and a hen, going back and forth about different proverbs and whether they're right or not. And it just resonated with me, this idea that there was a very different attitude toward proverbs in Chaucer's day. And in fact, as I...
studied the subject, it turns out to be really true that most historians of the proverb think of it as having declined over the course of the 18th century when proverbs started to seem déclassé. You find aristocratic writers saying that proverbs are low and contrary to that, from classical antiquity on,
Nancy Bradbury (03:19.822)
Proverbs were adaptable to any social level from the highest to the lowest. And it just made me start thinking about this different attitude. And then I found an edition of Chaucer's works from 1602 with every proverb pointed to at these pointing hands, right? Fists or manicures. And I thought,
No one reads Chaucer like that now. If anything, we sort of skip over the proverbial wisdom, right? But this prompted me to think about a different way of reading. What would it be like? What would a proverb -conscious reading of the Canterbury Tales be? So it started with Bruegel and Bosch and Gibson's book about how much fun they had with proverbs.
PJ (03:51.095)
Ha ha ha!
Nancy Bradbury (04:16.494)
made me think of Chaucer's fun with proverbs, and then made me think more seriously about a vanished reading practice. Nobody, but nobody now reads any serious literature to find proverbs and to think about them. So that's kind of what was in my mind as I wrote the book.
PJ (04:42.327)
I have some immediate jumping off points, but one I think to kind of set a foundation here. What is a proverb? Because it's easy to start drawing connections to what we do today. And I don't want to fudge the line between allusions, for example, and proverbs. So what are proverbs?
Nancy Bradbury (05:05.582)
Yeah, it's a great question. There's an early 20th century scholar, Archer Taylor, who wrote a book, The Proverb. And he starts out by saying that it's impossible to define the proverb and no one should waste their time looking for a definition. And later, Proverb scholars have called that Taylor's curse. It's impossible. But in fact,
I want to sort of do almost exactly what you alluded to and set it off from some other kinds of language. We think of a proverb today as a short, maybe kind of folksy, anonymous saying, right? Like the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Something along those lines. Don't count your chickens until they hatch.
But Chaucer's word proverb and the usage of his contemporaries was much, much wider. And they included what you're calling allusions, quotations from other writers. They had a big umbrella for the idea of a proverb. And so rather than trying to think of an airtight definition,
for something coming from a completely different culture. When I had just discovered that they look at these expressions really differently, I thought, no, I'll use an historical approach. And so I just took Spate's 1602 edition and whatever he said was a proverb that was good enough for me. And so all of the book, all of the proverbs that I talk about in the book are proverbs almost all, and I,
mark them when they're not. They're almost all proverbs that this editor, this Elizabethan editor, picked out and pointed to. So a proverb is a kind of a detachable piece of wisdom that the speaker thinks is worth saying. I think that might be as good a way to define it. Some modern proverb scholars want to
Nancy Bradbury (07:28.366)
say that a proverb has to be traditional or it has to be in circulation. But I don't think that is useful from the point of view of reception. If I use a proverb, if I say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and you've never heard that proverb, how are you going to judge its prior circulation? Is it traditional? Is it? And
Lots of writers, certainly Chaucer, made up proverbs on this. I'm completely certain he did. It's usually when he goes on and on about how old and venerable and wise they are, that he then gives you something that I think probably is made up to suit the situation. So, you know, proverbs are fascinating, but...
The most interesting questions to me don't revolve around what they are, they revolve around what they do.
PJ (08:31.895)
Yes, absolutely. Even as you were talking, I was reminded of, and I think it has a similar function. I did a lot of my own work in philosophical hermeneutics and with Hans -Jörg Gottemir and the idea of, he talks about census communists, which eventually from the Roman writers becomes common sense. And I was supposed to...
Nancy Bradbury (08:44.846)
Mm -hmm.
Nancy Bradbury (08:56.494)
Right?
PJ (08:59.127)
do a guest lecture on that as a graduate assistant. And I was trying to think about how to explain that to freshmen. And the best I could come up with in a very simple way was, it's the they in you know what they say. But it's not something I, I didn't spend the whole lecture doing that. I basically used that just to answer the freshmen's question. So thank you for listening to my question and thank you for answering it.
Nancy Bradbury (09:02.382)
Mm -hmm.
PJ (09:28.247)
What? So how good. Yes. Yeah.
Nancy Bradbury (09:28.654)
Yeah, can I say one more thing about it? Just to finish that point about reception and how you don't know if something's in common use or if they say it to you know, yours. My mother used to say that all the time. They say you're supposed to do this, right? I pictured this row of men in suits who say this particular thing. But there's a cognitive scientist, Richard Honak, who,
PJ (09:39.479)
Right. Yes.
PJ (09:48.727)
Yeah.
Nancy Bradbury (09:57.294)
did experiments with proverbs that he made up. A net with a hole in it won't catch any fish or not every oyster includes a pearl. And the thing was that the people who heard these made up on the spot proverbs recognized them. They knew what they were. They knew how to respond to them. They didn't look around for an oyster or a net or something like that, right? And so he argues that our
PJ (10:21.431)
Right.
Nancy Bradbury (10:26.894)
brains have an ability to recognize non -literal statements, metaphors, proverbs when they're imagistic or non -literal, right? You're not really talking about a noister. You're not really talking about a pearl. So that also sort of just pushed me toward thinking about reception, right? What does someone think is a proverb and then how does it function?
once you've decided that you're going to receive this expression as a proverb.
PJ (11:01.207)
I hadn't put a lot of effort into, honestly, I just wanted to move on to the point I was making. But even as you're talking about that, it's really interesting to think of, the important thing isn't who that they are, it's that the statement is recognizable as a they say kind of statement, right? Even as you said those two completely fabricated ones, I was like, I mean, it sounds like a proverb. Right?
Nancy Bradbury (11:21.742)
support me.
Nancy Bradbury (11:30.094)
There's also a scholar, Shirley Arura, who did field work with Spanish -speaking people in the area around Los Angeles. And she came to the conclusion that the important thing was the perception of proverbiality, not the history of the expression, and that people would respond with the same respect to the made -up proverb, as long as the genre.
was recognized. That's what I stress in the book, that it's recognition of the genre that then brings across that communal acceptance. One of the thinkers who really helped me was Erasmus, who wrote an introduction to this mammoth collection of Proverbs that he started in 1500 and kept up most of his life. And he says, what could be more convincing than what's on everyone's lips?
right? If you already think that everyone thinks this, it's got a persuasive power.
PJ (12:38.711)
Yeah, absolutely. Can you talk a little bit, you spend that first chapter talking about the history, kind of the growth of this Proverbs. So to go to what you said is the more interesting question, how are these Proverbs used?
Nancy Bradbury (12:55.15)
Mm -hmm. Well, the part about the history first, it just part of this difference that I'm drawing between the way we look at Proverbs and the way they did is this almost mania for Proverbs that was already underway in Chaucer's day, but continued to rise until the 16th century and
Erasmus's adages. I think that may have been the peak, but Proverbs were important through the 17th century too. 1602 for that edition with the pointing hands in it. So Proverbs were inscribed in rings and knives. People had them painted up on the walls of their houses. They put them on their children's toys.
Erasmus says, put it right where the child will see it no matter what he's doing, right, in order to teach through proverbs. And another important difference is that proverbs were the basis for elementary education in literacy. So a child's first experience with literature would be these Latin proverbs that they translated into English and then translated back.
into Latin or the other way around. So Proverbs were really different. They're fundamental to education and they were interior decoration. They were just around you in life in a way that they are now. But as far as how they're used,
What is fascinating to me is that still sometimes even now, Proverbs can have that same power to transform a situation, to make you think differently about something. And I'll just give you two quick examples. One is the proverb, boys will be boys. Between about 2015 and 2020, there were
Nancy Bradbury (15:11.822)
All of these articles don't say boys will be boys. Banish it from our vocabulary. And the argument was that it was transforming bad masculine behavior into something acceptable and maybe even lovable, right? It's just what boys do. It's shout down a woman in a meeting or whatever, right? Behavior that probably shouldn't.
be excused. I have to say it doesn't work for me. I would never say boys will be boys and I'd never be persuaded by it. It just wouldn't have any communal acceptance that I could subscribe to. But I like it as an example because it shows that for all these people saying don't say it, right? What could be simpler? Four words, boys will be boys. It's a tautology.
Why should those be words of power that we shouldn't even utter, right? Why give it that kind of power? But the power is the transformational power. And so another example, I said I give two, is long time ago, I was told about a hiring meeting in which there were two finalist candidates. And one was this,
brilliant but furious young woman who thought that the academy was dissing the work she did and she was just you know on the edge of her seat with fury but brilliant and her work was really exciting and then the other candidate was someone very steady and serious and she had written this book by a good press already right out of graduate school.
And a lot of us thought the book didn't even have an argument. It's a lot of information, but where was the thought behind it? And the department was leaning toward this safe candidate, the one who clearly was serious and had the book. And someone said, the tiger said, we have to take the furious one. The tigers of wrath are.
Nancy Bradbury (17:35.758)
wiser than the horses of instruction. And that's a proverb from William Blake. It's not a popular proverb. It's from his marriage of heaven and hell. But the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. And that just characterized those two candidates.
PJ (17:42.615)
Okay, yeah.
Nancy Bradbury (17:58.798)
in a way that just made it impossible to go for the horse of instruction, right? The steady, you know, not a whole lot exciting going on candidate. And we thought, you know, it has to be the wrath, the tiger of wrath. Neither of them took the job. So, you know, I'm sure they went.
PJ (18:07.319)
Right.
PJ (18:19.735)
Ha ha!
Nancy Bradbury (18:21.326)
It came off the horse of instruction and Tiger of Wrath went off to some other spot. But again.
PJ (18:30.487)
That was not the punchline I was expecting. That's great. I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Nancy Bradbury (18:33.582)
But, you know, the thing that fascinated me in retrospect when I started working on Proverbs was that Proverbs did exactly what Walter Benjamin, who is the one I'm getting this transformation line from, exactly what he said. Walter Benjamin says, Proverbs have a kind of magical quality. They transform the situation.
And that's how I would describe what happened in that deliberation over hiring. It just looked really different after you heard this amazing proverb because Blake calls them proverbs and he was influenced by Old Testament proverbs. But that was obviously something he wrote. It was pure Blake.
PJ (19:23.223)
Yeah, no, that, um, it's, it, yeah, it just sounds like Blake. Maybe I've heard it before, but then again, that might just be the proverbial nature. Um, the, um, it's really interesting that you talk about the boys will be boys. Uh, and then there's, cause men will be men does not have the same, you know, when you talk about a man shouting at a woman in a, in a boardroom meeting, if someone, someone said boys will be boys.
Nancy Bradbury (19:32.75)
Yeah.
Nancy Bradbury (19:44.43)
Yeah.
PJ (19:51.607)
probably not the right application of that, but also like, like, like, it was like, no, that would be now that's supposed to be men will be men. And that's definitely not, you know, um, it, what it does is it takes something harmful and it, and it, uh, it kind of, uh, makes it adolescent. Uh, and so it's really, yeah, that's really, it's really interesting. Um, yes.
Nancy Bradbury (19:55.15)
I'm sorry.
Nancy Bradbury (20:11.406)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
almost cute. Like, isn't that cute? He's monopolizing the conversation or whatever.
PJ (20:20.567)
right yeah yeah yeah um uh because i have i have found it being set around me but that's because i i have three boys so i'm like like and uh one of them is um uh he tried he tried to jump into a lake with an alligator he wanted to punch it um and i'm like
So one, I will say I grabbed the back of a shirt and that was a very stressful moment. It's just really interesting to see.
the difference like the context makes in the use of those. Like saying boys will be boys when you have a six year old climbing a tree, you know, for instance, versus like, yes, right. And like, you're like, that would be inappropriately cute, but also, you know, like, and for me, I started with boys and now I have a girl and.
Nancy Bradbury (21:10.222)
Yeah, and it's sweet.
Nancy Bradbury (21:22.862)
You have four children?
PJ (21:23.095)
She I yeah, I have five. So we went anyways, that's a whole other like I just recently this is just starting to happen. We're adopting to so like that's been a providential journey all along. But the the the the the the first girl is the oldest and so we're adopting her at an older age. So it's my first time seeing and it's so funny to see the difference.
I understand why that proverb can be used in different ways because like I would never think to use it in the context that you said and I hear it around me and but I Used to think I was like it's like man parenting is really hard and now I have a baby girl and She walks on the sidewalk and I'm like watching her desperately to make sure she doesn't run out in the road and she doesn't she just keeps walking on the sidewalk and I'm like Is something wrong? Is she okay? And then I'm like, oh that's
Nancy Bradbury (21:58.83)
Uh -huh.
PJ (22:21.111)
That's that little difference of testosterone there. I mean, obviously you have variations within that, but I'm like, oh, it's OK. This is what people talk about with that. Anyways, it's just really, it really struck me because I. Partly because there's a real frustration with that that kind of example you give of. The man shouting a woman down and someone just like you see that kind of just brushing off right that like infant and infantilizing infantilizing.
You know, anyways, sorry, I'm probably, I mean, I'm going off on this too long. Anyways, it's just really interesting.
Nancy Bradbury (22:51.118)
in the West.
Nancy Bradbury (22:56.974)
Well, I want to pick up on something you said, which is context, because that is so important. And so you think about a proverb, I think I mentioned, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, right? So let's say a friend calls me up, she's a wonderful writer, she's telling me the great news that her daughter got a story published. And I say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, right? And that's appropriate to the situation. What if she was telling me that,
her daughter was going to prison for selling fentanyl to children. And if I said the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, that would be cruel. It would be wrong. So what I find in one of the Canterbury tales, this big long dismal tale of Melaby that people do not read very much anymore, it's actually in prose, it's endless, and it's proverb collection.
PJ (23:31.767)
Okay.
Nancy Bradbury (23:56.622)
So, you know, if you don't have a use for these proverbs, it's a hard thing to read. But what I argue Chaucer's telling us, and Chaucer inherited this work, it's a very close translation of an earlier work. But what he's telling us is that a proverb is only as wise as its user. It's how it's applied.
And in that example I just gave, right, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. If it's used appropriate, then, you know, it can have some wisdom. It can be saying something worth thinking about. If it's used in that horrible application, it's not wise. It's cruel. And so what happens is that there's a character, Melibaeus, whose wife
is trying to teach him to deliberate before he gets violent. He wants to kill his enemies and she goes through a very long process of proverbs trying to lead him from this thirst for revenge to a use of deliberation and mediating nonviolent.
conflict resolution. It's actually very immediate. She talks about the rule of law. I mean, it's just wonderful. It's because the original author who Albertana Sobreschia in the north of Italy, that was now Italy, was a judge and a lawyer. And he was very distressed about vendetta in Italy and the cycles of violence that were set off by
and debtors. And so he wrote this long work full of these proverbs about deliberation and nonviolent resolution. And it's since it's a medieval work, it's couched very much in terms of controlling your emotions, controlling your appetites, what they thought of as the will, right, that your will can be diseased and lead you in the wrong direction. And so,
Nancy Bradbury (26:14.414)
By the end, she finally brings him around, but it's very hard for modern readers to read. I'm trying to think of what one scholar calls them, dead wise acres, the sayings of dead wise acres, because it's just so many sayings. But you're saying something perceptive when you say context.
Right? That it's not about, and Benjamin says this too in his little fragment. He says, it's not about applying a proverb to a situation which it superficially seems to match. It's about a proverb that's transformative, that makes you see the situation in a different way. Just like a metaphor can make us see something differently, a powerful metaphor.
So that's what a well -applied proverb can do.
PJ (27:18.135)
Well, and often, proverbs, in many ways, are just maybe lightly embellished metaphors. Is that a, not always, but like very commonly? Would that, is that, be a fair?
Nancy Bradbury (27:27.822)
Yeah, there are imagistic proverbs that it would be fair to say about and then there are non -imagistic ones like haste makes waste or something like that that, you know, doesn't have an image to it. So it depends on the kind of proverb. And as I'm saying, Chaucer casts this very wide net in his word proverb.
PJ (27:34.007)
Yeah.
PJ (27:55.575)
Yeah, and it's interesting you talk about transformational and magical and certainly wise versus unwise. As we talk about the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, would I be right in understanding that like in both cases it's magical, but it's not transformational in both cases? Is that a fair way to think about it? Am I on track there?
Nancy Bradbury (28:18.958)
Well, yeah, you're making me think about it in a different way. I mean, in a way, the horrible application could also be transformational, right? It could be designed to make this mother think that it's her fault that we're in this situation. So I guess it can be, let's put it this way, it can be magical and it can be transformative. What it isn't is wise. It's not wisdom.
PJ (28:31.511)
Yeah, right, right, right.
PJ (28:46.615)
Right. Right.
Nancy Bradbury (28:49.774)
Is that?
PJ (28:50.039)
And then I think we've all you know, it's you're talking about like how the melody one it's just like proverb on proverb And I this might be too far -field but it is really fascinating to me this idea of a proverb in the mouth of a fool I think that's actually in like the biblical book of Proverbs, you know how it just like falls dead or so I can't remember these You know, you think I'd be able to think of the actual proverb but the but I because I think we do see
proverbs that should be transformational, but when they're said by someone at the wrong moment or in the wrong situation, it falls flat. Is that a contextual thing? Because I think that's even a distinction from what you're talking about with, because the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, it does fit the mother in that situation. It's just very unkind, right? Versus like when someone says like,
Nancy Bradbury (29:27.214)
Yeah.
PJ (29:46.231)
You're like, what does that even mean here? You know, I mean, we've all had someone you're like, I don't think you know what that proverb means.
Nancy Bradbury (29:52.238)
Right, and it may not be true. It may have nothing to do with her. Maybe the father's an addict. The mother had nothing to do with this terrible development. So the apple did fall far from her tree if she's a good loving mother. And so I guess when you're talking about the Proverbs in the Bible, in the Hebrew wisdom books, they're loaded with Proverbs.
PJ (29:58.871)
Yeah, yeah.
PJ (30:06.487)
Yes.
Nancy Bradbury (30:22.062)
about wisdom and foolishness. And a lot of those end up in Chaucer. He's very interested in wisdom and in fools. And it's interesting that that notion of wisdom and fools in the wisdom books, there's a kind of pessimism that most of the people you're meeting are fools and most of what human beings say is foolish. It's just part of that.
pessimism that informs the discussion of wisdom in that Hebrew Bible. But in the New Testament, the whole thing is complicated by the idea that worldly wisdom is not true wisdom. And so St. Paul says, if you want to be wise, become a fool, because the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God.
That's not an exact quotation, but that's how the thinking runs. And Chaucer, of course, as a Christian, is also interested in that idea, and that whoever looks most like a fool might actually be wise if you think about it a little more or you listen a little more to what this fool is saying. And conversely, of course, you'll see sages pontificating.
And you realize that they're making fools of themselves because the timing is wrong and no one's listening or whatever.
PJ (32:01.975)
Yeah, I don't have anything to comment on that specifically. That is helpful. And it's interesting to see. I mean, of course, like Chaucer in his context is going to be absolutely absorbed in scripture. Like that's going to be a part of it. Which actually, I think, takes us nicely into, I want to ask you, and this is a common thing with, we see with different kinds of proverbs, is that he draws this difference between the wisdom, perhaps, of clerics versus, and I,
You'll have to tell me how to pronounce it. I know I'd butcher it, but the working man, what is the term they use for working man? Churl. Okay. Oh, okay. It's just spelled differently. Right.
Nancy Bradbury (32:36.814)
Yeah, just like our word, churl. Yeah. Yeah. And it shows you how that word developed, right? It originally was a word for a peasant, a working man, an ordinary working man. And now we say churlish behavior. Well, originally that was a class term. So I actually have stopped using that.
PJ (32:46.135)
Mm -hmm.
PJ (33:00.343)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nancy Bradbury (33:01.262)
because I don't want to call anybody a churl. But yeah, churls, I use the Middle English term instead of peasants because peasant actually doesn't become common until the early modern period. It's not a medieval word in English, although it is in French. And so.
Chaucer's word is churls, and he also uses it for working men in a town, for someone in a city who's of the lower classes. So that's why churls. But the wisdom of the churl in the Canterbury Tales is one of the ways that Chaucer, I think, attacks the clerical idea that the clergy
has a monopoly on all the wisdom that matters, right? And so you'll find the clerics saying things like, you can't understand the Bible, so I will tell you my story because it will suit your intellect. And then in Chaucer, it's always something terribly self -serving, like you need to give me money. And there's a...
story about a friar who's collecting money and he uses all these proverbs in an extremely self -serving way. But there are all these churls, mostly men, a woman or two, who are beleaguered or angry, distraught, and they're being manipulated or pressured or talked down to, condescended to by these
clerics, right? Clerks, Chaucer calls them, but it can mean someone studying for the church, someone in the church, or even a really well -educated person. So Chaucer sometimes called a clerk because he was so well -educated even though he was not in the church, was never in clerical orders. So it's something, it's a rivalry.
Nancy Bradbury (35:09.678)
that I noticed only because I was following those pointing hands and reading all the proverbs and looking for patterns. And one pattern was these contestations between simple working men and incredibly condescending clerics. And so that to me is a subtler dimension.
of the anti -clericalism that's famous in the Canterbury Tales, right, in the general prologue, all the rascally clerics and the corrupt partner and so forth. But this seemed to me to be something that mattered to Chaucer. It comes back, this condescension and sometimes rapacity of the clergy, you know, really, really using this claim to higher wisdom to rob.
or defraud. People who don't have the same level of education and therefore maybe are vulnerable to this kind of of suasion. So that's the clerical piece. And then what I really had fun with is the contestation between clerics and women. And probably the best loved fictional character in the Canterbury Tales is the wife of Bath. And
What stood out to me reading the proverbs was that so much of the anti -feminism that she's countering is a matter of anti -feminist proverbs. And they're horrible and they're hateful. And some people have even thought of her prologue as an anti -feminist work because she's quoting all these atrocious statements about
women. It's better to live with a serpent in your house than with a woman and you know all this you know but what I argue is
PJ (37:11.479)
Forgive me, I'm not gonna take that one and use that with my wife. I don't think that'll go over well. No.
Nancy Bradbury (37:17.006)
She's like smoke in your eyes, like dripping rain from the roof. I mean, where they come from, a lot of Chaucer's proverbs is from anti -matrimonial discourse that was meant to discourage members of the church from marrying.
So there's this whole body of these proverbs that are about how your life will never be livable again if you have a woman in your house. So that's where that comes from. But what was fascinating to me in the Wife's Prologue after I started looking at these proverbs as proverbs was that, that,
The way she quotes them, this imaginary female voice quotes them, really undermines them. And so she says things she's calling her husband, she claims her husband said them and she calls him an old dotard. And she says, what ails you to talk this way? And all around these statements are her saying, this is the.
proverb of a shrew, you know, a rascal. And that I was alerted to by something Mikhail Bakhtin had said about proverbs as utterances nested within other utterances, that they can keep their firm boundaries because the speaker changes, right? You're just talking and then you quote a proverb.
And then you go back to just talking. That's a shift in speaker. And so when the speaker changes, Bakhtin says, the expression keeps its firm boundaries, but they become porous and by a kind almost like an osmosis, the voice of the proverb speaker infiltrates. And Bakhtin calls it reaccentuates the proverb.
Nancy Bradbury (39:29.23)
so that you don't hear living with a woman is worse than living with a dragon as just a proverb, you hear it as something that the speaker is deploring. And so that was really interesting to me. And just to finish that piece about women, the prologue is all this conflict with these male voices saying these horrible proverbs.
And then in the tale, she introduces this imagined wise woman, a fairy, who transforms her husband with a series of proverbs. And he has been this hateful figure. He starts off the tale by raping a young woman in the woods for no explicable reason. And this wise woman,
gets him, gives him the wisdom that he needs to save his life. And the wisdom is that women want sovereignty, right? And so he finally speaks the wisdom at the end, but the way she teaches him and Chaucer uses a vocabulary of pedagogy all around her, the way she teaches her husband is by Proverbs.
right? Those were the heart of moral education in this period. And modern readers read that and they think, well, that's a long speech to make. It's they're in bed on their wedding night. She gives this speech that is about a quarter of the length of the whole tale. And she and there and she draws on these wonderful proverbs from Dante and from lovely.
PJ (41:10.071)
Hahaha!
Nancy Bradbury (41:26.286)
sources and their resonant proverbs and I think they would have made a big impression on Chaucer's contemporary audiences. But modern readers tend to read through the proverbs at the end of it he says okay you choose if you want to be young and beautiful but maybe unfaithful or
Do you want to be faithful, but stay old and ugly? And he's finally learned his lesson. Women want sovereignty. So he says, you choose. And she gives him both. And she becomes beautiful and faithful. And if you don't believe in the moral efficacy of Proverbs to change someone, it's actually really infuriating. What?
You know, he's horrible. He rapes this young woman. He's horrible to his wife. He calls her old and ugly and of low degree. And she gives him everything she wants, everything he wants. But it's the difference to me, it's the difference in the view of Proverbs and what they can do, what they can accomplish.
PJ (42:33.239)
And if you don't mind kind of expounding on that more, I'm really fascinated by both this idea of how is it different to read proverbially? You already mentioned that like it gives you more access to Chaucer and the structure. But in general, like when you're reading, how does it, is there a different experience when you're reading proverbially? And is there anything that we could take away from that? Obviously we're not, we're,
No one's going to rewrite Canterbury Tales. At least, it would have to, they'd have to, yeah, yeah, but not like, yeah, yeah. Not as a, they could do a tribute, but not the original. Is there other lessons that we can draw from reading proverbially as we assess the world around us?
Nancy Bradbury (43:07.15)
We'll see people do, but...
Nancy Bradbury (43:28.654)
Well, really the utility of it that I promote in the book is for reading pre -modern literature, really important works of literature. I didn't do that, did you? Yeah, I can't explain.
PJ (43:42.519)
I did not do that. That was amazing. I did not. I've never seen that before. I didn't even know that was possible. Okay. Well, apparently Riverside really liked that. It was like pre -modern interpretation is the best. It is worthy of celebration. I don't disagree. So thank you, Riverside, for the impromptu balloons. That's so funny.
Nancy Bradbury (43:59.31)
Thank you.
Nancy Bradbury (44:04.558)
I'm sorry.
Nancy Bradbury (44:09.902)
I wasn't expecting that. But back to your question, I think for, I love it. A takeaway that I would encourage isn't so much about reading, although I encourage people, especially if you're reading early literature, to think about how important a proverb might be.
PJ (44:17.559)
Sorry. All right. Apologies.
Mm.
Nancy Bradbury (44:37.774)
in that early work of literature. And Chaucer, I think, tells us a lot about proverbs. And one of the things he really worries about is the way that a proverb can preempt a reader's meaning. You know, it's short, it's outside of time, a work of fiction takes a long time to develop, and a proverb can comment really
in a devastatingly brief way. And it can make the story seem like it's over, it's read, it's interpreted, and its meaning is out there. And what Chaucer cares about, and I think any serious poet and fiction writer, is the reader building up multiple meanings, right? That's certainly the way I see Chaucer as a writer, layering these meanings. And so it's really important.
not to let a proverb become the moral of what you're reading and sum it up and crowd out all the different ways that you might read it and apply it to your own life. So maybe that speaks to what you're saying. You know, what can we today think about proverbs or read them? But the other thing I would say is listen to proverbs. You know, some proverbs are really...
wise, not all of them. Most of them it's a matter of how you use them, but there are a few. The one that was said to be written on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, know thyself. How's that for advice? Right? Self -knowledge, what do we all need? What more of? What should we all be in pursuit of?
So I would say don't discount that there might be more to a proverb than you immediately see.
PJ (46:40.695)
Yeah, and they generally are proverbs for a reason, right? Especially the ones like, and this is where it is like, at that point, we are talking about ones that are in circulation, right? Like, not the ones that, you know, Dr. Honak just made up on the spot, right? Like, but that, you know, haste makes waste. There's a reason people say that, right? Like, and...
Nancy Bradbury (46:45.102)
Thank you.
PJ (47:08.343)
So I think those sorts of things definitely are important. Even as you're talking there though, about the way that Chaucer uses proverbs, and it's very clear that he doesn't use them, it's not Aesop's fables where it's like, and boom, you know what? I'm glad you read the story, but that's the meaning right there. And maybe one way to think about it,
especially like with knowledge in general, but I think especially with Proverbs is to see them as, and I just wanna make sure I'm tracking here, but that they're not capstones, they're more foundations for you to be creative for, and really like that wisdom impulse, that it gives you room to find a better way. Is that, and rather than just like, well, now I understand it. Is that a fair way to think about it?
Nancy Bradbury (48:04.366)
Yeah. Yeah. Chaucer really works against that idea of you get a moral at the end. Sometimes he'll give you what sounds like a moral and it's actually the opposite of the way most people would read the story. The person who it is glorifying is actually the bad guy. And he does all these things. Sometimes they're just comically irrelevant. Like what could this possibly have to do with that story? So he goes out of his way.
to disrupt that idea of a story means this. But yeah, I think what you're saying about foundations or Kenneth Burke calls Proverbs equipment for living. And I think that's another way to think about them, that there's a lot of human experience behind a proverb.
PJ (48:50.935)
Mm.
Nancy Bradbury (49:03.598)
and maybe it does have something useful for you to do if you're trying to make a decision. And this idea that the wisdom of Proverbs is multiple. Some people are very distressed by the fact that Proverbs contradict one another. I mean, of course they do, right? What single piece of advice is gonna be the right one for every situation? So.
There's look before you leap, very proverbial idea, think about it, maybe think up a proverb, right? Or he who hesitates is lost, the opposite, right? But you need to assess the situation. Is it a dire emergency where a pause could be lethal? Or is a situation that could be set aside for a little bit?
while you deliberate, while you think about it. So of course they conflict. It doesn't mean proverbs are baloney. It means that they're not cure -alls, right? That you have to think of the right one in the right situation.
PJ (50:17.719)
Dr. Bradbury, it has been an absolute joy talking to you today. Thank you for coming on.
Nancy Bradbury (50:23.79)
It has been my pleasure. Thank you for your interest in this topic. And good luck with those five children. And thanks for the balloons. Take care.
PJ (50:30.487)
Thank you, appreciate it.
Yes, absolutely.