ABSTRACT
Social historians have not shown a great deal of interest in proverbs, but this appears to be changing as more and more historians are looking at how proverbs reflect the attitudes of various social classes at different periods. George Boas, for example, treated just the Latin proverb “Vox populi, vox Dei” and its vernacular European translations in his book Vox Populi: Essays in the History of an Idea (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969). But there are also major articles by D.B. Shimkin and Pedro Sanjuan, “Culture and World View: A Method of Analysis Applied to Rural Russia,” American Anthropologist, 55 (1953), 329–348; Donald McKelvie, “Proverbial Elements in the Oral Tradition of an English Urban Industrial Region,” Journal of the Folklore Institute, 2 (1965), 244–261; and Natalie Z. Davis, “Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Error,” in N. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford/California: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 227–267 and 336–346 (notes).
