Over the course of three decades, Joel Rosenthal has contributed substantially to our knowledge of individuals and society in late medieval England. Just as important, however, have been his insights about how one goes about acquiring and organizing this knowledge. In Telling Tales, Rosenthal subjects three familiar, and as he characterizes them, “jejune and, to a large extent, formulaic” sources to a close reading in order to “illuminate aspects of a society that we take for granted” (xiii). His sources are also disparate, these being the Proofs of Age contained in the Calendars of Inquisitions Post Mortem, the records of the Court of Chivalry regarding the controversy over the coat of arms shared by Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor, and Margaret Paston's letters. At first glance, then, Rosenthal's choice of sources, with the possible exception of the Paston correspondence, hardly seems promising. Moreover, the juxtaposition of these three very different kinds of sources in a single book appears rather strange. Yet, given the Rosenthal treatment, these laconic witnesses not only speak eloquently, they also tell us a richly textured story of cognition, memory, communication, and social construction in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England.

Rosenthal is refreshingly unabashed about his faith in the value of the sources and his role as the fashioner of narrative, hence, the very apt title of this book. Indeed, the book is constructed of a multitude of individual narrations organized into an ever expanding master narrative in such a way that from many come one, and yet the one never obscures the many. The tales from the Proofs of Age are the most varied, in the sense that they are culled from some six decades of testimonies of 140 juries, each of twelve free men, attesting the age of heirs coming into their inheritances. Each juror's individual tale—this being the story of how he knew the heir's age—is also very brief, thanks to the routinized nature of the escheator's questions and the court's conventions of efficient recording. Nonetheless, from these tales one can glean how memories were made and later recollected in a process that was not only deeply personal—recollections of births, deaths, and injuries, for example—but social as well, since a juror's memories were often formed from communal experiences, which more than likely had happened in the local parish church. The sum total of these jurors’ individual recollections not only established the veracity of the heir's claim to majority but also reinforced social bonds.

The strengthening of social bonds is also much in evidence in the depositions taken in the Scrope-Grosvenor contest of 1386. Yet, here the social bonds being strengthened are not those of the village community, as in the case of the Proofs of Age, but are rather of a more exalted and partisan group, this being the aristocratic and clerical supporters of Richard Lord Scrope of Bolton. In this controlled and ritualized conflict, the family and affinity of Sir Richard told tales whose sole purpose was to establish beyond any doubt the Scrope right to use a particular coat of arms—Azure, a bend Or—which, in their eyes, the parvenu Grosvenors had unjustly usurped. Here Scrope's affinity and friends attest the excellence and antiquity of his line (going all the way back, they say, to the time of the Conqueror) and bear witness to having seen the Scrope arms borne by him and his ancestors in battle and represented in old church glass and ancient seals. Taken together, these memories both reinforced the martial, elitist ideology of the deponents and narrated a kind of Scrope family chronicle.

Rosenthal rightly detects a hint of “status anxiety” underlying the bold attestations of Scrope nobility. For the Scropes of Bolton had risen to their current rank through service as lawyers and judges and had only recently become “men of tourneys, battlefields, and writs of summons to the House of Lords” (151). The gentry Pastons were somewhat in the same boat, since Margaret's husband John's grandfather was of villein stock. Thus, on her marriage into this family “on the make,” Margaret had to shoulder her share of the business of family protection and self-promotion. And this, says Rosenthal, was the primary purpose of her letters, to inform her husband of important goings on at home and to keep her sons in line. Margaret's letters are a very different kind of source from the other two dealt with by Rosenthal, making this chapter on first glance seem to fit a little uncomfortably with its neighbors. This impression is quickly dispelled, however, by the author's microanalysis of the letters’ form, content, and method of production, showing that they, too, witness to the complex interplay of personal recollection, discourse, and social construction, which is the subject of this book. Likewise, the letters, like the judicial records, give us precious glimpses into the life, experience, and social relations of late medieval people.

At the conclusion of Telling Tales, Rosenthal asserts that “as an empiricist and relativist, I argue for the right to judge the bona fide voice of any given source, to determine how far we should follow its lead and how much we should take it on trust as a representative sample of a larger whole that remains hidden” (153). After a lifetime of sensitive, creative engagement with the sources, Rosenthal has more than earned that right.