Rival Wisdoms: Reading Proverbs in the Canterbury Tales

In this elegantly written study, Nancy Mason Bradbury situates Chaucer’s last and most ambitious work in the context of a zeal for proverbs that was still rising in his day. Rival Wisdoms demonstrates that for Chaucer’s contemporaries, these tiny embedded microgenres could be potent, disruptive, and sometimes even incendiary. In order to understand Chaucer’s use of proverbs and their reception by premodern readers, we must set aside post-Romantic prejudices against such sayings as prosaic and unoriginal. The premodern focus on proverbs conditioned the literary culture that produced the Canterbury Tales and helped shape its audience’s reading practices. Aided by Thomas Speght’s notations in his 1602 edition, Bradbury shows that Chaucer acknowledges the power of the proverb, reflecting on its capacity for harm as well as for good and on its potential to expand and deepen—but also to regulate and constrict—the meanings of stories. Far from banishing proverbs as incompatible with the highest reaches of poetry, Chaucer places them at the center of the liberating interpretive possibilities the Canterbury Tales extends to its readers. Revelatory and persuasive, this book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval and early modern English literature as well as those interested in proverbs and the Canterbury Tales.

About the Author :
Nancy Mason Bradbury is Professor Emerita of English Language and Literature at Smith College. She is the author of Writing Aloud: Storytelling in Late Medieval England.

Review :
“Rival Wisdoms is a revelatory book, composed with grace and clarity. The insights Bradbury offers into how the culture of wisdom literature permeates the Canterbury Tales enhance understanding of Chaucer's vision, from the fabliaux and the Wife of Bath through Melibee and the Nun's Priest's Tale.” —David Raybin, coeditor of Chaucer: Visual Approaches “Rival Wisdoms is an important work that promises to reshape the scholarly discourse surrounding the proverbs Chaucer employs so lavishly in the Canterbury Tales. Nancy Mason Bradbury has a real—and rare—gift for expressing herself in prose that is erudite while being equally accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike, and in this well-wrought study she leads her readers on a meticulously plotted journey through the myriad (and at time surprising) ways Chaucer and his fictional characters deploy proverbs.” —Mark C. Amodio, author of The Anglo-Saxon Literature Handbook “Rival Wisdoms is a learned and sprightly account of medieval and early modern appreciation of proverbs and of the reading practices proverb-love prompted. With Chaucer as her guide, Bradbury reads proverbs for their potential as increasing the interpretive possibilities inherent in narrative. She deepens our understanding of the contestation that lies at the heart of the Tales. As Bradbury demonstrates, for good or ill, the proverb adds meaning and becomes central to the conversations embedded in texts.” —Lynn Staley, Colgate University