One of the great challenges facing historians of any era is to make the strangeness of the past comprehensible in the present. This task is especially difficult for scholars of the Middle Ages, a period that can seem particularly alien to modern sensibilities. In Telling Tales, Joel Rosenthal takes us on a journey through some familiar sources from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England to show how memories and recollections can be used to build a compelling portrait of daily life in the late Middle Ages. Rosenthal is a senior medievalist whose work over the years has spanned several related areas, including family history, women’s history, the life cycle, and memory and testimony. In Telling Tales, he brings all of these interests to bear on three seemingly disparate bodies of sources: the letters of Margaret Paston, depositions from a dispute between the Scropes and Grosvenors over a contested coat of arms, and Proof of Age proceedings, whereby the legal majority of an heir was established.
In Rosenthal’s hands these familiar sources all speak to questions of testimony, memory, and narrative at a time when written records were just becoming widespread. In Margaret Paston, we see a woman who helped hold family and family business together as she mastered the arduous and complex task of letter writing. In the knights whose tales were elicited for the Scrope and Grosvenor case, we witness the bonding of men-at-arms in the Hundred Years War. From the Proofs of Age, we have brief tales that are rich in the give-and-take of daily life in the village—memories of baptisms, burials, a trip to market, a fall from a roof, or marriage to another juror’s sister. From a historian at the top of his craft, Telling Tales shows how medievalists can turn scraps of recollection into a synthetic story, one that enables us to recapture the strange and lost country of the European Middle Ages.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Preface
Introduction: Telling Tales in a Social Context
1. Proofs of Age: A Rich Fabric of Thin Threads
The World of Jurors and Testimony
The Mechanics of Recollection
Jurors’ Life Cycles and Life-Cycle Memories
Ecclesiastical Memories
Memories of the Secular World
Communities Large and Small
The Construction of Memory in the Proofs
2. Sir Richard Scrope and the Scrope and Grosvenor Depositions Recollection Re-creates Fellowship
Cognition and Recollection
Tales of the Scropes: Battles and Banners
3. Margaret Paston: The Lady and the Letters
Letters as Artifacts
Constructing the Letters: How to Tell It Like It Is
First Stuck at Home and Then Mostly Alone
Conclusion: Some Final Reflections
Notes
Bibliography
Index
“Telling Tales is interesting and lively reading for specialist and general audiences alike. It certainly demonstrates that the documents generated by fairly restricted groups in medieval society (a single family, the landed elite) can be deposed so as to reveal the history of other, more broadly based social groups.”
—Sherri Olson, Journal of English and Germanic Philology
