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The essay examines the themes, poetic diction, metaphors, and rhetorical devices of the Exeter Book riddles 12, 52, and 72, selected because they associate Welsh servitude to oxen and because they include images of captivity and bondage, showing a connection between slavery, ethnicity, and conduct through the multifaceted term wealh, which relates to slavery, Celtic origin and transgressive behaviour. The noun came to signify both racial and social difference; the analysis reveals that it conveyed moral otherness as well. The cultural equivalence of ‘slave’ and ‘beast’ gives Celtic slaves a status as ethnic, social, and moral ‘other’, so that the figures of the riddles embody the cultural distance between labourers and aristocratic elite, illuminating the opposition between ‘self/other’, ‘English/Welsh’, ‘free/bound’. The subjugated condition of the Welsh is exploited with the didactic aim to convey monastic concerns such as the transience of wordly joys and the loathing of earthly life.

Proverbs in the medieval Frisian laws have been studied ever since Jacob Grimm called them to his readers’ attention in 1816. Most energy was thereupon placed in spotting and collecting them for inclusion in large collections of German proverbs which were fashionable in the nineteenth century. Also in the twentieth century, scholarly activity focused on signalling their stylistic ‘Germanic’ beauty or lifting them out of their context and placing them in lists and anthologies. In this contribution, the proverbs in the Old Frisian law texts are analysed in the light of recent paremiology with an eye to both their form and the function they have in their immediate context.

The generic tone in which practical instructions and moral advice are formulated in medieval didactic texts is one of the features which guaranteed them success and broad diffusion as it permitted their use in different contexts. This assumption applies also to the Leken Spieghel, a didactic treatise written by Jan van Boendale in the second decade of the fourteenth century. This essay presents the sections connected to the urban sphere and, in more general terms, to the Duchy of Brabant, by comparing the information contained in the Leken Spieghel with the author’s other texts and by taking into account also some historical events. The aim is to provide a better understanding of the Leken Spieghel teachings and of the possible reason for their inclusion in this text.

Gnomic tradition in medieval Germanic texts can be studied from different points of view. Maxims, proverbs, wise sayings, and various rules of life and behaviour pertain both to phraseology and paremiology, since they can display particular syntactic features as well as a reflection of the social and cultural environment in which they were transmitted. The analysis of these phrases and of their context leads to interesting results enriching our knowledge of past traditions, archaic words and constructions, and it allows to observe the development of meaning and form of ancient idioms still in use. The present contribution aims to focus on this particular branch of historical linguistics, which brings philology closer to other disciplines ranging from language history to pragmatics.

As it is now widely recognised, The Wife’s Lament, one of the most intriguing and enigmatic Old English poems, is based on a female speaker uttering her grief for the absence of her loved one. Partly due to its grammatical ambiguities and the unclear chronology of events, many passages of the poem remain obscure and defy a shared understanding. The interpretation of the final lines (42-53) has frequently been a matter of passionate debate: some scholars believe they contain a curse against the man who deserted the woman; but they should rather be considered as a series of gnomic reflections on the need to endure distress and unhappiness with stoic resignation. The essay examines the structural and lexical features of the concluding lines of the poem, comparing them with analogues from other Old English texts; the final considerations show the coherence of those lines in relation to the poem as a whole.

In his poem about Robert Bruce’s life and enterprises, John Barbour (1319-95) uses the gnomic element in a variety of ways. Proverbs, maxims, and occasional gnomic utterances or verses are employed to shape the text, as commentary, prolexis, summary, example, and comparison, in order to give an insight into the personality of important characters (especially the protagonist), and highlight propagandistic and ideological themes that are an essential part of the poem’s complex frame.

The present essay raises the question whether the so-called ‘mystical saying’ (Mystikerspruch), a widespread phenomenon in spiritual German literature and flourishing in the fourteenth century, is the minimum unit of the treatise and the sermon from a purely formal aspect – i.e., a quotation attributed to various authorities who reportedly pronounced it – or if the saying corresponds, for its content, to the literary genre of the dictum (Spruch) and therefore deserves, with good reason, to be considered part of gnomic literature together with sentences and proverbs. The essay first challenges the category of the ‘saying’ in modern scientific literature, then examines the use of the quotation in medieval manuscripts, and finally traces the presence of sayings in Eckhart’s German sermons and in texts by Tauler and Seuse. It ends with the analysis of two sayings attributed to Meister Eckhart.

Il volume raccoglie saggi dedicati alla tradizione gnomica nelle letterature germaniche medievali. Dopo un primo contributo che illustra i principali filoni della ricerca fraseologica e paremiologica, le trattazioni approfondiscono l’elemento didascalico affrontando questioni linguistiche, letterarie e socio-culturali in diversi generi testuali, alcuni orientati a contenuti gnomici, come indovinelli, codici giuridici, raccolte di massime e proverbi, altri di carattere epico, elegiaco o mistico. Gli studi toccano le aree di lingua inglese, tedesca, nederlandese e frisone, nei periodi antico e medio, con contatti e riferimenti anche all’area nordica. I numerosi microtesti gnomici mostrano una grande capacita di diffusione e penetrazione in diversi ambiti culturali, sia circolando singolarmente che inseriti in testi piu ampi. Stilemi e contenuti ricorrono in tutte le aree linguistiche europee, evidenziando lo stretto legame fra il mondo germanico e la tradizione sapienziale classica e biblico-cristiana.Contributi di Davide Bertagnolli, Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Elisabeth De Felip-Jaud, Valeria Di Clemente, Elena Di Venosa, Marusca Francini, Dagmar Gottschall, Concetta Sipione.