Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England

Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England
ISBN-10
0271047933
ISBN-13
9780271047935
Series
Telling Tales
Category
Reference
Pages
252
Language
English
Published
2010-11-01
Publisher
Penn State Press
Author
Joel T. Rosenthal

Description

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.

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