A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants before the Plague, by Judith M. Bennett

Abstract

At a paper in Oxford in 2019, Judith Bennett spoke about writing the history of the marginalised. She reasoned that if we want to know about the life of peasants, we must be willing to do a lot with a little. There, the topic was sub-peasants—those below Cecilia Penifader and even her less well-off neighbours. But the point stands: tiny gasps of information enliven reconstructions of medieval peasants’ lives. To use Bennett’s own metaphor, a few found coins can tell the story of a world of exchange; so, too, must the barest details of a life tell the story of a whole mode of existence. In the first edition of this book, published over twenty years ago as A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c.1295–1344 (1999), Bennett went one better. This peasant was not an amalgam; she was specific, located. In a crowd still so often nameless and faceless,...