Blunt And Instructive Poem by gershon hepner

Words can be blunt and instructive,
but frequently they are destructive.
Far better perhaps to be Trappist
than savagely, hip-hoppy rappist,
but silence is no vow I’m able
to take, so I put up with Babel,
and hope you, also, dear reader,
accept like a Lebanon cedar
that destruction of forests cannot
be avoided when you have a lot
set aside for a temple. The same
applies to the words that we maim
when writing a poem, but silence
is, passive-aggressively, violence.
You have to destroy when instructive;
if not, you will be counterproductive.

Michael Kuczynski in Bryn Mawr Review reviews Sandy Bardsley’s “Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England, “ Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,2006:

Speech, Chaucer explains in the House of Fame is only broken air. The definition is intended (however scientifically accurate) as
pedantic: it's spoken by a burlesque Dantean eagle, one of many instances in the poem of ironic understatement. Joking aside,
however, medieval poets, like such modern novelists as Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie, know that there's nothing soft about language. In satire, especially, it's often wielded as a weapon. And outside the literary ambit, in life, it can get even more unruly. Courts of law have to concern themselves constantly with the blunt and destructive social impact of words. How they do so, and the often self-serving aims behind their policing efforts, is in any age a complex cultural narrative.

Sandy Bardsley's fascinating new book is not so much interested in medieval satire (there is a brief interlude on literary texts, on
which see below) , but rather in historical fact, insofar as incomplete medieval records allow this to be reconstructed. She uses case
documents from medieval courts of law, both firsthand and by means of previous investigators' forays, to demonstrate how a particular kind of violent speech, scolding, became matter for jurisdiction in late medieval England. More specifically, she emphasizes a key cultural moment in post-plague England when women were losing access to an informal but respected means of drawing public attention to outrageous crimes, the 'hue and cry, ' while at the same time enduring demonstrable 'overrepresentation in the scolding category' (89) . Within this jurisdictional frame, Bardsley argues, scolding came to be associated primarily if not exclusively with women, although pre-plague it was an offense just as likely to be charged against men. Through careful analysis of patterns of litigation, she is able to show the extent to which male society, in the venues of both secular and church courts, worked to silence women's dissenting discourse by labeling it as mere nagging: a stereotypical rather than idiosyncratic vice. Her argument is richly supported with statistics drawn from more than 600 late medieval records and graphs that represent convincing patterns inferred from these numbers.


12/9/07