“By the market fowlks, a man may know how the market goeth”: Proverbs in Early Modern English personal letters

Abstract for the Helsinki Corpus Festival, 28 September–2 October 2011, Helsinki, Finland.

Teo Juvonen (University of Helsinki), Melanie Evans (University of Birmingham) and Samuli Kaislaniemi (University of Helsinki)

In his celebrated treatise on rhetoric, The Garden of Eloquence (1593), Henry Peacham defined the proverb as a well-known and witty form of speech, either drawn from the vernacular or “commended by antiquitie and learning”. Proverbs in literary and poetical texts of the period have received much attention, but less is known about their use in non-literary, private genres, such as personal letters.

This paper examines the distribution and function of proverbs in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC).

We describe the proverb as it appears in the CEEC, and consider the trends of use. We examine social variation by correlating the use of proverbs with the social background of the users. We explore the probable function of proverbs in correspondence and the different properties of these examples compared with more literary contexts. We also address the methodological problems involved in locating proverbs (as undefined lexical items) in large corpora such as CEEC.

Our study indicates that proverbs were used throughout the period by all members of society, and verifies the view that the 16th century was the heyday of interest in proverbs. In particular, the level of explicitness in the use of proverbs was found to increase over time; it seems likely that the act of using a proverb, as well as the proverb itself, became significant to 16th-century letter-writers.