Proverbs and romances: a road in two directions

This study explores the many connections woven between proverbs and romances owing to the use, in both genres, of a common type of phrases. This contact is analyzed in versions that already circulated during the fourteenth century, which leads us to conclude that the junction between these two genres happened much earlier than the lexicalization of romance verses and their insertion into collections of classical proverbs. On the other side, studying various versions of the same romance allows us to observe that the introduction of proverbs does not necessarily need to take place at the moment when the ballad is created, but is a consequence of the ballad's performance.