This new volume offers a wide-ranging examination of petitioning and supplication in medieval England and beyond. As befits an edited collection, the chapters focus on a very diverse selection of topics and periods, but the volume as a whole makes two key contributions to the scholarship. First, Strategies of Persuasion is the first full volume to bridge the gap between studies of petitions to royal authorities and those addressed to ecclesiastical authorities. There already exist large secondary literatures on both these topics individually, but Smith and Killick's effort opens up a much more direct dialogue between these scholars and encourages comparative perspectives. Second, as the title implies, the collection foregrounds the wider "strategies" involved in medieval petitioning, including not only the rhetoric of the texts themselves but also the processes, politics and concurrent actions undertaken by petitioners. Attention to these contexts shows the contingent and constrained nature of much medieval petitioning.
The historiography of petitioning has developed rapidly over the last decade, with major contributions from Mark Ormrod, Gwilym Dodd, Anthony Musson, Helen Lacey, Barbara Bombi and many others, as well as earlier publications from the editors of this volume. Yet there previously has been little attempt to bring together these rich streams of scholarship into a single publication that encompasses multiple types of petitioners and institutions. This grievance has been remedied by Strategies of Persuasion, which includes petitions from individuals and groups to the king, to parliament, and to the church, especially the Papacy. The eleven chapters collectively demonstrate the remarkable range of people involved in instigating, creating, presenting, investigating and adjudicating petitions in this period.
The first four chapters focus on petitions to the king, whether submitted directly or via parliament, as well as those addressed to parliament itself. Gwilym Dodd examines the emergence of English language parliamentary petitions from the 1420s and shows that, although some of these were more "creative" and "literary" in style than their French precursors, most continued to use conventional formulas to present the relevant facts of their case. He shows that the changing circumstances in which they were presented and examined by the king and parliament help to explain their gradual changes in lexicon. Helen Lacey analyses the 800 surviving petitions for pardon from the fourteenth century, drawing attention to the role of intercessors--often queens or military commanders--and the fairly prosaic rhetoric that they used. In some cases, simple petitions were accompanied by dramatic "scenes of supplication" and the rhetoric of physical submission sometimes turned up in the texts too. The nature of the petitioning process is revealed in even more detail in Helen Killick's chapter on the scribes who produced them. She finds fascinating evidence of clerks who both wrote petitions and helped to expedite the passage of these requests through the complex administrative institutions that handled them. Killick's chapter very effectively shows the diversity of scribes--both London and provincial, highly professional or merely occasional--involved in royal petitioning. Anthony Musson focuses primarily on manorial tenants in the court of Chivalry, whose petitions often cited specific statutes and occasionally even quoted directly from Magna Carta. Although petitions had lower standards of proof than other forms of litigation, Musson suggests that petitioners frequently appear to have received legal advice that shaped their arguments and phraseology.
The next three chapters also examine petitions to the king, but focus on those from churchmen rather than laypeople. Matthew Phillips uses several petitions to the king from the Bishop of Durham and his antagonists in the early fourteenth century to illuminate the often decisive role of political developments in determining the nature and success of these supplications. In these cases, the timing and context of the request was much more important than the rhetoric or even veracity of the claims within the text. Shelagh Sneddon also highlights the crucial influence of power politics in petitioning, using supplications from two abbots in 1328. Here the changing situation in the Borders and the relationship between the English and Scottish kings directly shaped both how these prelates presented their cases and how they were received. Philippa M. Hoskin then looks at how clergymen responded to lay invasions of church property in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The petitions she uses are the requests for common law writs for royal force to expel those who had occupied their churches.
The final three chapters turn to petitions submitted to the Papacy or more local ecclesiastical authorities. Thomas W. Smith discusses the struggles over control of benefices in the thirteenth century, which frequently led to petitions from competing English and Italian claimants. He highlights the problems raised by long-distance supplication--notably the time and expense involved--but also finds that the papal supplicatory system could still provide a plausible route for redress even in disputes between imbalanced claimants. Frederik Pedersen looks at marital litigation in the York Cause Papers, showing that many of those who submitted requests to the ecclesiastical courts were very knowledgeable about canon law and this was sometimes bolstered still further with the help of the personnel associated with the courts. As one might expect, the text of these documents was shaped by jurisdictional limits as much as by the facts of the particular cases. In the last chapter, Kirsi Salonen analyses the wording of petitions from clergymen involved in homicides seeking mercy or complete discharge. The role of proctors as scribes and advisors looms large in these documents, though the investigations that followed submission of a petition meant that clergymen had to be careful to present something that could stand up to factual scrutiny.
Smith and Killick have succeeded admirably in their aim of drawing together historians from two distinct scholarly conversations into a single volume. The range of different types of petitions explored is impressive and, as such, it is a very valuable contribution to the field. Its impact would have been enhanced still further with a more extensive introduction or a conclusion of some kind that undertook more direct comparison and analysis. Likewise, although all the chapters made use of petitions, a couple included only minimal discussion of the actual texts or processes. These are, however, minor reservations about an otherwise excellent collection. Historians of supplication--and medievalists more generally--will find much to learn in this new volume.