Smart Marie De France Knew the Ways of this World – Medieval Advice Literature (Fables) and Social Criticism in its Relevance for us Today

Abstract

Since antiquity, a huge body of short texts has been produced in which deep wisdom of timeless value has been formulated. The succinct, poignant formulation of an idea has commonly achieved its purpose very effectively in many different life situations, and this in all cultures. Those texts, whether proverbs, aphorisms, epigrams, riddles, memorial verses, and the like are still with us today, but in recent years the interest in and familiarity with them seems to have faded, at least in the public. Only a few decades ago, it was very normal for students or other individuals to have memorized many of such short statements and to know how to apply them to their own lives. Many of them were regarded so highly that they populated the back pages of ordinary kitchen calendars and other publications for easy and public consumption. In foreign language classes, it was standard practice to work with some of those short texts, but today they often seem to be too conservative, naive, meaningless, and hence to be virtually irrelevant because of their putatively overly traditional, perhaps outdated values. 1 In fact, they seem to be belittled today and hardly enjoy the respect they really deserve.