In this insightful, closely argued, richly detailed, and very engaging book, Joel T. Rosenthal brings his full attention and considerable intellectual skills to bear on three types of "so- called lesser sources"--late-fourteenth-century Proofs of Age, the depositions offered in the Scrope and Grosvenor dispute that erupted near the end of the fourteenth century, and the letters of Margaret Paston, the matriarch of the much studied fifteenth-century--in which he has been interested for a number of years. Narrow in their focus, heavily, oftentimes entirely formulaic, and frequently very brief, these three sources are familiar and much-studied texts that in and of themselves seem unlikely to shed much light on anything beyond the narrow contexts within which and for which each was produced. Reading through the Proofs of Age, Scrope and Grosvenor depositions, and even, although to a lesser extent, Margaret's letters, one encounters not the cacophony of individuated voices one might expect to hear in what are, after all, the written remains of spoken language; rather, we discover voices that, in the process of conforming to the specialized expressive economies that developed for and were used within each type of discourse, have lost most, if not, indeed, all of their distinguishing characteristics. Taken together, these three groups of sources indeed appear to be, to borrow the sub-title to the book's first chapter, "thin threads" that were produced within specific social contexts for very specific purposes and that were, moreover, never intended to put forth anything resembling a coherent worldview but were meant simply to address the issue at hand, be it establishing the age of an heir, the right of Sir Richard Scrope to display the disputed coat of arms (Azure, a bend Or), or the domestic details of running a fifteenth- century household. The matters upon which each type of source touches may have been of immense interest to the involved parties, but when situated within the sweep of medieval English history, they appear as mere blips, if they register at all.
But the purpose of Telling Tales is not to study the events which prompted the creation of these texts but something far more challenging: listening carefully, and with fresh ears, to what are at best largely formulaic fragments of narrow and specialized types of discourse, Rosenthal nonetheless pierce the veil of sameness that characterizes each of the "micro- narratives" he considers and in so doing admirably illustrates the ways in which even such familiar, and apparently thin, sources can yield significant information on a number of crucial, and still far from understood aspects of the medieval world, including "the relationships and interactions of daily life", the "role and construction of social or collective memory" (xiii), and the large changes that attended and marked the culture's transition from orality to literacy.
Getting beyond the surface of formulaic discourse, whether we're talking about a Homeric epithet, a thirteenth-century deposition, or a staple of contemporary social interaction such as the phrase "Have a nice day," is difficult in large part because we tend to view such discourse as being reductive, mechanistic, and close to, if not already, meaningless. But as Rosenthal demonstrates throughout this study, when formulaic discourse is approached through an interpretive strategy that does not inappropriately distort it, the results can be truly striking and quite valuable. We may, finally be no closer to recovering the uniquely idiosyncratic voices behind each micro- narrative, but being able to do so, while no doubt valuable at some level, is finally beside the point: what's far more important is the way in which the strategy of close reading that Rosenthal adheres to throughout allows him to interrogate the ways in which "formulaic discourse and its appeal to the collective memory" helped shaped the larger community in which the discourse was articulated, a community that "was the proper and trustworthy repository of knowledge about its own". (15) Although he acknowledges that the material he presents "is not going to open new vistas on behavior, life experience, or family relations", it does offer powerful confirmation of "some basic ideas about life and death in late medieval society" (24), confirmation that arises from Rosenthal's successful imposition of "social or sociological (if not literary) unity upon a world re-created by weaving together jurors' testimonies, depositions from the Court of Chivalry, and a string of letters from a diligent wife and mother". (xv)
Telling Tales opens with an illuminating introductory chapter in which Rosenthal carefully sets forth his goals and methodology, sketches his over-arching interest in the socially constitutive power of memory and recollection, and deftly contextualizes his sources within their respective historical moments. In the book's three subsequent chapters, he offers close readings of each of these sources in turn and works with and through them all with great care and precision. In his extraordinarily capable hands, these apparently thin, or 'lesser' sources, yield a great deal of valuable information. Chapter 1, "Proofs of Age: A Rich Fabric of Thin Threads," argues that the Proofs not only "reflect a re-created past" but that in doing so they also are "evocative regarding the process of re-creation" (2) and so speak directly to the interconnectedness of memory and community. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to explicating the "complex structure of recollection and collective social memory--some of it explicitly stated, much of it left to be inferred--on which the legal procedure (or fiction) rested," a structure that is "easy to overlook" because "the individual testimonies are brief and formulaic". (9) After detailing the "mechanics of recollection", Rosenthal turns in sequence to consider the life-cycles of the jurors and demonstrates how their memories of such signal events as marriage, births and baptisms, deaths, and natural disasters, to name but a few of the categories he presents, along with far more "workaday" memories and even occasional recollections of "play [and] unstructured leisure time" (50) are presented and how such memories reveal "the way in which men chose to situate memories within the social landscape--controlled by an obligation not to subvert the business and by a desire both to be taken seriously and to foreground themselves among their fellows in recalling how an external event, such as a birth or baptism, was linked with the internal or the personal." (60) Under his skillful guidance, the proofs emerge as "case studies" through which nothing less than the "fabric of English life is revealed". (53)
Chapter 2, "Sir Richard Scrope and the Scrope Grosvenor Depositions," focuses on primary sources--the depositions offered on behalf of Sir Richard Scope's claim to the arms Azure, a bend Or--that do not evidence anything like the "wide panorama of lived experience" Rosenthal unearths in the Proofs, but it is precisely the depositions' "focus and directed purpose that enable [him], in synthesizing their collective 'message,' to coax from them nuances of cognition and memory and to re-create the fellowship of common experience and bonding on which they rest--to shore up the dike of social memory against the waters of time". (63) As is the case in chapter 1, Rosenthal again focuses upon "details and small distinctions in memories and varieties of expression" as he explores both the "light the depositions shed on memory, recollection, and cognition" and reads the testimonials embedded in the depositions "as a constructed and unified text-an aggregated literary construct". (65) While the depositions, like the Proofs, "can be readily dismissed as repetitious and formulaic chit-chat," doing so would be a grave error because "memories of old battles and old companions were memories of the workplace, of what these men had done for a living". (91) While war stories were no doubt as wide-spread a discursive genre during the Middle Ages as they remain in contemporary culture, had it not been for the depositions taken in the Scrope and Grosvenor dispute, the recollections the deponents offered concerning "the banners, the companions, and the confusion of the field as they had once formed their ranks at Crecy or Poitiers or Najara" would have been irretrievably lost, since orally transmitted tales, of derring-do or otherwise, rarely survive for even a generation beyond the tellers' lives.
The book's third chapter, "Margaret Paston: The Lady and the Letters", follows the strategy of the first two in that it offers close readings of some very familiar texts (Margaret's share of the surviving letters produced by the prolific Pastons), but in this chapter Rosenthal shifts gears and does not seek to construct a coherent, larger social narrative out of Margaret's letters; rather, he strives to "de-narrativiz[e]" them in order better illuminate--and understand--how these texts that were designed "to impart cognitive substance of some sort" organize the memories they entext and how they also apply "the social and physical techniques of letter writing" upon which Margaret relied when composing them. (104) Rosenthal pays special attention to the complex roles the various scribes she employed played in producing her extant letters (none of which are in Margaret's hand) and to the conventions that had developed by the mid-fifteenth century concerning the construction and content of epistolary communication. After considering the contents of the letters, which touch upon such topics as "Consumer Affairs" (137) and "Births, Deaths, and Other Local News" (141), Rosenthal turns to Margaret's will, a "long and unusually personal document" and argues that it "holds our attention because it can be read as a late (or posthumous) monologue on Margaret's identity as a Paston". (144)
While he makes no grand claims for the importance of the three types of sources he utilizes in this study, Rosenthal everywhere in Telling Tales demonstrates the value, and by extension the necessity, of approaching even the most formulaic and seemingly limited of sources on their own terms, of working with them from the inside out, and of employing a responsible and responsive interpretive strategy. Although this is a rich, provocative, and beautifully executed book, I do wish that Rosenthal had offered more of his thinking on the late-medieval oral-literate nexus and the ways in which orality functioned in what were, strictly speaking in all three cases, originally spoken texts that were encoded on the written page from the lips of speakers. I also wish that he had taken up more fully the issue of how gender figures in, and perhaps complicates, the creation of written documents in the fifteenth century. These are, however, at best minor quibbles that do not in the lest diminish the value and accomplishment of this splendid and important book, one in which the author admirably succeeds in weaving a rich and compelling social history of late medieval England out of the 'thin threads' of his sources.