Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England Jenna Mead Rosenthal, Joel T. , Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003; cloth; pp. xxv, 217; 2 figures, 14 tables; RRP US$49.95; ISBN 027102304X. On 29 March 2006 a conference titled 'Exploring the Social in the Later Middle Ages: A Conference in Honor of Distinguished Professor of History, Joel Rosenthal' was convened at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England is only Professor Rosenthal's most recent monograph after Old Age in Late Medieval England (1995), his joint editorship of Medieval England: an Encyclopedia (1998), Late Medieval England (1377-1485): a Bibliography of History Scholarship 1975-1989 (1994), Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History (1990), Patriarchy and Families of privilege in Late Medieval England (1990) and a plethora of articles published in a wide range of journals. Rosenthal was 69 years old when this study of three sets of documents – witness testimonies of Proofs of Age, the depositions made on behalf of Sir Richard Scope in the Scrope-Grosvenor trial and the letters of Margaret Paston – was published and his examination of these three different sets of documentary witnesses coheres as much through its consistent methodology as through what I want to call its temper. As well as meaning 'mental balance or composure, esp. under provocation of any kind,' temper has the now rare or obs. connotation of 'proper or fit condition.' This is as much a matter of tone – manifested in an always leisurely and sometimes anecdotal prose style – as it is of discriminating judgement that searches out meaning without overstating the results. [End Page 199] Rosenthal's analysis depends upon 'a methodology that will seek to impose social or sociological (if not literary) unity upon a world re-created by weaving together' (p. xv) the selected testimonies, depositions and letters. He aims to show 'how the gulf between kinds of sources can be narrowed, if not closed, depending on who is doing the synthesizing, and when' (p. xxi). 'The three bodies of sources are far from traditional narrative history and differ from one another. But they can be linked, or at least lined up in a row, in keeping with a certain self-explanatory logic; their degree of similarity and compatibility allows me to fold them into a meta-narrative' (p. xxi). The primary means by which Rosenthal achieves this meta-narrative is by coalescing the regularity and predictability that derive from recognising the formulaic nature of his sources with the specificity, veracity and concord produced by these documents as social acts of community memory. The characteristic mode of proceeding is to expound the detail of the documents with care and attention; offering statistical analysis where it will elucidate patterns of occurrence or categories of similarity to organize a mass of material into larger units. Rosenthal has an argument about 'modes of cognition and types of memory' that he adduces from the documentary sources rather than from, say, theoretical studies such as Mary Carruthers's The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture and that operates as a substratum just beneath this detailed treatment. There is no argument that Rosenthal's larger project of the synthetic or meta-narrative is a proper and persuasive task but the status of this species of narrative might, perhaps, have borne a little more scrutiny. At no point does the term 'narrative' enjoy definition or analysis: 'narrative' seems to mean 'record;' 'tale' implies 'story' but without the connotation of 'fiction' (pp. 72 ff). Instead, this capacious term supports deft and suggestive – though fragmentary – discussion of such complex notions as social memory lodged, as this one is, somewhere between social history, cultural analysis and theoretical speculation. Rosenthal concludes his examination of Proofs of Age, for example, by directing us to accept that what they reveal is 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...