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.
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