Telling tales : sources and narration in late medieval England / Joel T. Rosenthal.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rosenthal, Joel Thomas, 1934-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Paston, Margaret, 1423-1484--Correspondence.

Paston, Margaret.

Paston family.

Scrope family.

Paston, Margaret, 1423-1484.

Heraldry--Great Britain--History--To 1500--Sources.

Heraldry.

Families--Great Britain--History--To 1500--Sources.

Families.

Jury--Great Britain--History--To 1500--Sources.

Jury.

Narration (Rhetoric).

History.

Historiography.

Great Britain--History--Medieval period, 1066-1485--Historiography.

Great Britain.

Great Britain--History--Medieval period, 1066-1485--Sources.

Great Britain--Genealogy--Sources.

Genre:

Genealogy.

Physical Description:

xxv, 217 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

University Park, Penn. : Pennsylvania State University Press, [2003]

Summary:

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 in 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:

Introduction: Telling Tales in a Social Context xiii

1 Proofs of Age: A Rich Fabric of Thin Threads 1

The World of Jurors and Testimony 1

The Mechanics of Recollection 9

Jurors' Life Cycles and Life-Cycle Memories 15

Ecclesiastical Memories 25

Memories of the Secular World 38

Communities Large and Small 52

The Construction of Memory in the Proofs 57

2 Sir Richard Scrope and the Scrope and Grosvenor Depositions 63

Recollection Re-creates Fellowship 63

Cognition and Recollection 66

Tales of the Scropes: Battles and Banners 79

3 Margaret Paston: The Lady and the Letters 95

Letters as Artifacts 95

Constructing the Letters: How to Tell It Like It Is 114

First Stuck at Home and Then Mostly Alone 133.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-212) and index.

ISBN:

027102304X

OCLC:

52214633