[SCA-BMDL] TMR 06.02.09, Rosenthal, Telling Tales (Amodio) (fwd)

Tue Feb 14 12:32:13 EST 2006

Something that may be interesting to our bards and heralds.

Odriana

"Do not dismiss the dish saying that it is just, simply food. The blessed thing is an entire civilization in itself!"
- Abdulhak Sinasi

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:42:26 -0500
From: The Medieval Review <tmr-l at wmich.edu>
To: tmr-l at wmich.edu
Subject: TMR 06.02.09, Rosenthal, Telling Tales (Amodio)

Rosenthal, Joel T. Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in
Late Medieval England. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2003. Pp. xxv + 217. $49.95 (hb).
ISBN 0-271-02304-X.

    Reviewed by Mark C. Amodio
         Vassar College
         amodio at vassar.edu

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.