In Margaret Paston's Piety, Joel T. Rosenthal plumbs the 104 extant letters and Will of this matriarch of the Paston family to "see how conventional religious conviction, expression, and behavior were integrated into the long, busy, and complicated life of a pious laywoman" (xvii) in fifteenth-century England. Intertwined with this study of Margaret Paston's piety is an engaging and insightful exposition of the author's approach to the social historian's craft. The two are intertwined by necessity. The task of the social historian is to recover and reconstruct everyday life. Although Margaret Paston's status as a member of the landed gentry removed her from the ordinary folk of the village, Rosenthal contends that in her spiritual life Margaret was a "conventional, pious, sober (and feminine) representative of late medieval lay religion" (4). According to Rosenthal, this makes her a much better exemplar of typical lay religion than her much-studied contemporaries Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, "women of flamboyant but atypical religiosity" (4). However, that very conventionality means that Margaret's religiosity went largely unremarked, necessitating creative and skillful reading of the sources, and careful weighing of the evidence.
After introducing his subject and its challenges in chapter one, Rosenthal divides the book into four chapters or essays. Each approaches the sources from a different angle in the attempt to recover Margaret's piety. Chapter two analyzes the saints' days and feast days Margaret chooses from the ecclesiastical calendar to date her letters as a way to access her participation in the cult of the saints. Chapter three focuses on what is said, done, and owned by Margaret and her family for insight into her religious sentiments, beliefs, and activities. The pious wording and phraseology in her letters is dissected. Scattered comments regarding her pilgrimage to Walsingham and the pilgrimages of other family members; their attendance and activities at church; and the various dealings in regard to the family's chapels and chaplains, ecclesiastical livings, and benefices are probed. And Margaret's will is scrutinized for evidence of the religious books and objects she owned. Chapter four focuses on the funeral practices of the Pastons, including where they chose to be buried. Chapter five explores the material and physical context of the world with which Margaret Paston interacted by examining what remains of the churches, religious houses and Norwich Cathedral to which she made testamentary bequests.
Rosenthal argues that Margaret Paston's piety "was conventional in virtually every respect" (4), in that her letters and Will reveal that the secular and the spiritual were inextricably intertwined (5). In his opinion, this makes her "an important and attractive centerpiece for a case study of spiritual life as part of daily life" (4). To emphasize Margaret's conventionality and its value for our understanding of late medieval English piety, Rosenthal repeatedly contrasts her silence regarding faith as a personal or internal matter with the very public and personal expressions of faith by her contemporaries or near contemporaries, especially Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, whom he describes as the "strikingly atypical...mystic and the weeping breast-beater" (4; see also xvii, 1, 8-9, 43, 61, 80, 81, 109, 127).
Margaret's conventionality, however, also makes it very difficult to recover her spiritual life. As Rosenthal notes, "the premise that what Margaret says and does is typical and conventional, and that what those hypothetical 'typical' and 'conventional' people of fifteenth- century England did (and said) is just about what Margaret did and said" (46) is a circular construction. To negotiate that analytical roundabout, Rosenthal undertakes a "multilayered agenda" (46), reading the sources carefully and closely, producing numerous tables of data in the process; and searching for the resonances and dissonances between the data that have been gleaned from them and what we already know about the worlds in which they were produced. Those are the usual methods of the social historian. However, two things set this study apart. The first is the skill and creativity with which they are executed. Rosenthal, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, is well acquainted with Margaret Paston and her milieu, the idiosyncrasies of the sources, and with the tools of his craft. Out of a few scattered bits of information and voluminous silences, he pieces together a fairly detailed picture of Margaret Paston's piety.
The second thing that sets this study apart is the transparency of Rosenthal's process. Throughout the book he thinks out loud, explaining to the reader what he is doing, why he is doing it, where one can go wrong, and how to avoid doing so. Particularly striking, and instructive, is his attunement to the eloquence of the silences. Rosenthal set himself a daunting task in attempting to recover the unremarkable piety of a medieval woman. In explicating his process, Rosenthal not only provides a model for undertaking similar tasks, but also encouragement to do so.
Less laudatory is Rosenthal's repeated dismissal of Margaret Paston's more "flamboyant" contemporaries. Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe do serve as useful foils for Margaret Paston's conventionality. And, admittedly, in the past there was a tendency to equate these exceptional women's expressions of spirituality with late medieval English women's piety. However, the derisive tone used when comparing Margaret's contemporaries' exceptional spiritualities with her conventional piety jarringly contradicts Rosenthal's lessons regarding the careful and creative exploration of all of the available sources necessary for the recovery of typical lay religion.
Nevertheless, he does have a point. There is only so much extraordinary persons and events can teach us about the everyday. At the end of this study, Rosenthal concludes, "the evidence argues that [Margaret Paston] took her faith very seriously, and that she never felt any need or desire to express herself in terms of personal revelation, let alone by raising awkward questions about life and devotion as it was taught and/or received" (150). Such conventionality, as this volume demonstrates, takes skill and creativity to recover. In Margaret Paston's Piety, Rosenthal both challenges students of the past to go beyond the relative accessibility of the exceptional in order to recover the conventional, and provides a model of how to go about it.
This volume will appeal to scholars and students alike. Its accessible writing style and methodological musings make it an excellent text for college-level history courses. Scholars and researchers will also appreciate the informative notes and extensive up-to-date bibliography.