Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb

If “knights” construct (and propose that popular wisdom contemplate) a proverb that encourages the exclusion of the peasant from the pleasures of attentive and intelligent tasting, peasants on their side try to keep masters at a distance, excluding them (at least in proverbs) from their world of “ignorant” flavors.

The reason behind this can be guessed, but there is no dearth of proverbs that explain it with total clarity. “He who shares his pears with his master does not get the best ones,” says a fourteenth-century French proverb, Celui qui partage les poires avec son seigneur n’a pas les plus belles. The same can be seen in the traditional Italian proverb, A chi mangia le pere col padrone non toccano le migliori (whoever eats pears with his master does not get the best ones). A Spanish saying is even more precise: if you take the risk of dividing them with him “he will give you the hardest and will eat the ripest” (darte ha las duras y comerse ha las maduras). The advice, in substance, is to avoid close relations with those in power, because no matter how you do it, you lose.

With time, another interpretation arose: to choose the best pears in the presence of the master would not be impossible for the peasant but would be unfitting. Better to reserve them for the master as a sign of respect and submission: “Do not to share the pears with your master” can mean, according to a contemporary commentator, “the respect with which one should always treat superiors.”

Evidently, we are dealing with “readings” explicated by the social status, which express contrasting interests. Both perspectives are present in the 1611 commentary by the English writer Randle Cotgrave on the fourteenth-century French proverb, “Whoever eats pears with his master either can not or should not select them as he wishes.” In short, the meaning of a proverb, above all if it has a “social” context, changes with the changing point of view.

We will return to this shortly. In the meantime, let us look at another proverb in which the logical and narrative function of the master is taken by another character—the bear. “Whoever shares a pear with a bear always has less than half.” Question: in this scene, does the bear merely play the part of the consummate glutton, or does he stand for lordly arrogance? I would not dismiss the second hypothesis in view of the frequent analogy found in medieval culture between the virtues of the potentes, the powerful (strength, courage, combativeness), and the nature of large wild animals such as the bear. Let us try to parallel this proverb with another that we have already considered: “To the worst pigs go the best pears.” We would find ourselves before two indicators of social identity: on one side, the master represented (in the peasant’s eyes) as a bear, on the other side, the peasant represented (in the master’s eyes) as a pig; it is a shame that certain delicacies wind up in his unworthy stomach.

To look for the meaning of a proverb, on one side in the mental universe of the peasant, on the other side in that of the master, seems to me necessary in order to penetrate its significance, or rather the conflict of its signifiers. The two cultures intertwine and demonstrate opposing interests, but both use the proverb as an instrument to affirm its own point of view. As Camporesi remarks, from the mouths of Marcolfo and Salomone, Bertoldo and Alboino “flow the same streams of proverbs.” Except that the peasant and the king use them differently and with endless ambiguities. What we hear at times is a veritable dialogue of the deaf (or those pretending to be). Thus the “wisdom” of proverbs is, at least in some cases, heavily weighted with social and cultural connotations. It is not only the context of production but also, above all, that of use that determines the meaning.

The proverb, wrote Monique Rouch, is a “polyvalent maxim” that can be adapted to various situations according to the needs and feelings of the interlocutor. It is a text that places itself in the margin of the main argument for the purpose of confirming and specifying it, while at the same time finding in it the explanatory context that the proverb, by itself, is lacking. It is a text outside the text, as Elizabeth Schulze-Busacker calls it, referring to the works of Greimas and Schmarje: “a prefabricated element” taken from a repertory extraneous to the text that enters it from outside, integrating it while remaining distinct. Apart from the oral or written origin, from the “popular” or “sagacious” aspect that can characterize it from one time to another, a proverb is distinguished by a particular expressive code, by a recognizable form insofar as it is “closed,” which makes it possible to individuate and analyze it in the most diverse literary contexts.

The same holds true for contexts of various types such as figurative use. The art historian Michael Camille, following the intuition of Lillian Randall, thought he could trace in proverbs the origin of much of the iconography that decorates the margins of the principal illustrations in medieval codices. Andrew Otwell pointed out that this relationship is one not only of content (figures that represent proverbs) but also of function through the analogy of the part that proverbs and marginal figures play, the former in the verbal discourse, the latter in the iconographic “discourse.” Marginal figures (often ironic and parodic, hard to understand by themselves) do not have a determined and objective meaning. They are allusions, suggestions to the eye that sees them, which may recognize in them a saying, a proverb, a turn of speech. Only in relation to this do they acquire meaning. Marginalia and proverbs, Otwell concludes, “are not lacking meaning . . . but they do not in themselves convey a complete meaning. They are activated by their association with a text.”

This is what causes the instability of meaning characteristic of marginal images and of proverbs, which Camille defined as “speech without a speaker.” And this is why the historian cannot limit himself to investigating the “origins” of a proverb, to reconstructing the processes by which a new saying enters into the collective patrimony. However valuable, such an endeavor would be incomplete if we did not try to restore to the speech—that is, the proverb—the voice of its speaker. Only the voice gives it meaning. And if the speakers are different, the meanings will be different, even if, as Schulze-Busacker has observed, whoever makes use of a proverb never reveals his personal point of view but tends, on the contrary, to depersonalize it, seeking authority in a saying that clams to be “universal” and “objective.”

Ever since the Middle Ages, collections of proverbs have come down to us through a double registry of attributions, in some cases going back to ancient sages and philosophers, in others to simple folk, the populace, the peasantry. This is not necessarily a rhetorical invention. The proverbial style has long been marked either by cultivated or by popular language. However, proverbs that are identified in historical anthologies as “common,” “rural,” or “vulgar” can, in some instances, truly be popular in origin “even when they have been modified for use by non-peasants” so as to be “at the service of knights and officials,” as Natalie Zemon Davis writes. An example of this is the collection of so-called peasant proverbs (Li proverbes au vilain) compiled by a twelfth-century cleric at the court of Duke Philip of Alsace, to whom it was dedicated and by whom it was probably commissioned. But the contrary also holds true. Many “popular” proverbs were in turn expressions of ideas alien to the peasant world. In the modern era, especially, many proverbs having a cultivated origin became the patrimony of a subordinate culture. The recommendation for moderation in the consumption of cheese, which Baldassare Pisanelli called “a common proverb” at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was none other than a popular restatement of an aphorism generated by the medical community of Salerno. Is “One swallow does not make a summer” not perhaps a quotation from Aristotle?

Beyond the expressive form of the proverb, what peasant culture and learned culture had in common was “the renunciation of a presumed monopoly of wisdom,” as Davis puts it. Vox populi vox Dei was an unknown or secondary concept for a very long time. Only as of the seventeenth century did it begin to take root. Proverbs merely professed “one side of the truth,” Davis remarks, but one might also say, the truth of a side.

The mechanism according to which certain rules, norms, and prescriptions entered into peasant culture, assuming a position of authority within that “popular encyclopedia” that comprised the certainties and enigmas of proverbial sayings, is a complex one that does not operate in a self-referential manner, but rather arises from the interaction of various influences, from a circularity of things known (already pointed out by others, in particular Carlo Ginzburg) that demonstrates the permeability of both the culture of the ruling classes and the culture of lower classes, a continuous interchange between high and low in the definition of learning models.

The circularity of models, which did not exclude deep contrasts and conflicts, seems to have diminished in the eighteenth century when the Enlightenment railed against proverbs as a “den” of superstition and “popular misconceptions” to be fought in the name of science. But the very same ideal of educating the populace (to combat medical prejudices, or to promote new farming methods) made use of the proverb as a medium of communication and propaganda. One need only leaf through texts on agronomy to discover a way of thinking literally stuffed with proverbial phraseology. Also revealing, and explicit in its complexity, is the circular mechanism referred to earlier.

The best example, it seems to me, is a brief work, one of many by Provost Marco Lastri, a highly active promoter of agronomy in the Tuscan countryside during the last years of the eighteenth century, titled Proverbs for peasants divided into four categories, to serve as precepts for agriculture: a handbook intended for landowners to circulate among their peasants, who in turn will acquire useful knowledge for increasing annual harvests. Published in 1790 in Venice (but the proverbs were already in an earlier edition of the Treatise on Agriculture by the same author), the handbook illustrates by its title alone the cultural significance of the endeavor: Lastri, the intellectual, collects, but also produces proverbs, diffusing them among the landowners to make them known to the peasants who accept them as rules of conduct.

So long as the subject of proverbs was information about climate and the seasons or instructions on the labors to be accomplished in this or that month, it is hardly surprising that the peasant tradition adopted them as its own, although in some cases peasants themselves may have been at the origin of this tradition; after all, the observation of nature and its vital cycles is certainly not the sole prerogative of landowners. Less obvious is that peasants welcomed into their own repertory of proverbs an adage such as the one about cheese and pears, inspired by a cruel antipeasant satire that, in its original meaning, hoped for the exclusion of rustics from the secrets of gastronomy. And yet, even this adage came into use and was documented in the collection of “popular sayings,” as defined by Giuseppe Giusti in 1853 in the introduction to his Tuscan Proverbs. It is precisely Giusti’s collection, enlarged in 1871 by Gino Capponi, that provides the principal link connecting the proverbial tradition of the sixteenth century with the anthologies that still today list our proverb, which has remained solidly entrenched in the spoken language.

The fact is that proverbs are extratextual and have a life of their own outside of the texts waiting to be activated and to acquire a meaning. Having become popular, the proverb of cheese and pears awaited a (new) meaning, coherent with the (new) text it accompanied, that is, the text of peasant speech, discourse that is spoken and handed down orally.

When it is not reduced to a kind of insignificant nursery rhyme (many today, when asked about the meaning of the proverb under discussion, admit they do not know), the proverb assumes an ironic quality that pokes fun at the original meaning and with a sly wink attributes to the imperative do not let know the meaning of “it is unnecessary, it is superfluous to let know.” Amply confirmed in oral use, this decisive variant of meaning (probably after the nineteenth century) also appears in the commentary that accompanies the most recent anthologies of proverbial locutions. “Why conceal this delectable secret from peasants?” Dino Provenzal asks. “Because they are not considered worthy of such exquisite pleasures? Because they would devour all the master’s cheese and pears? Mystery. What is certain is that the contemptuous phrase is widely known.” The first hypothesis (because they already know) was unquestioningly accepted by Bruna Lancia in the introduction to the previously mentioned Detti del mangiare (sayings about food): “The coupling of cheese and pears is so delicious that it needs no publicity for the peasant, who produces both of them.”

In this way the meaning of the proverb has been literally subverted: once the speaker has changed, the speech acquires another meaning. The peasantry, after having appropriated an adage invented against them, has turned the satire against the opponent. A new proverb could even be coined, the equal and contrary of the preceding one, in which the repository of wisdom is not the master, but the peasant: Al padrone non far sapere / quanto è buono il formaggio con le pere.

The cultural mechanism that generates this mutation is manifested in the extended version of the proverb, vengeful and liberating, still heard today in the countryside around Siena:

Al contadino non far sapere
Quanto è buono il formaggio con le pere.
Ma il contadino, che non era coglione,
Lo sapeva prima del padrone.

Do not let the peasant know
How good is cheese with pears.
But the peasant, who was no jerk,
Knew it before the master.