Telling Tales is an attempt to “impose narrativity” (13) on tiny scraps of story from legal and domestic documents to illumine patterns of daily life in late medieval England. Drawing upon three well-known sets of documents—Proofs of Age from the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV (1377–1413), testimony entered in the Scropes-Grosvenor suit (1386), and the letters of Margaret Paston (1441–78)—Joel T. Rosenthal fixes each set in its documentary context, offers a protocol for linking the records internally, and identifies overarching narrative shapes toward the end of revealing how his medieval sources expressed their roles as parts of one or more communities.

Rosenthal borrows his title (without acknowledgment and perhaps unknowingly) from a 1998 anthology by Francesca Sautman, Diana Conchado, and Giuseppe Di Scipio. In beginning his preface, Rosenthal acknowledges his major scholarly influences in a strange way. After declaring his debt to three recent classics—Natalie Davis's Fiction in the Archives (mistitled Fiction and the Archives in the text), Michael Clanchy's From Memory to Written Record, and Barbara Hanawalt's The Ties That Bound—he fails to cite them again, because “Some distance is good for scholarship, even if it comes late in the day and, no doubt, at the price of even more guidance and insight” (xi). Both in titling his book and in submerging his sources, the author isolates his work from its predecessors, a curious course given that his project is to articulate “the nature of sources, the concept of community, and the role and construction of collective social memory” (xiii). Thus the book sets out to reveal long-vanished interrelationships at the same time that it ignores the scholarly interrelationships that brought it into being and that link it to a community of historians.

The infelicities of these framing conventions are almost canceled by the rich heart of the book: three suggestive case studies that tease out valuable hints of community from fragmentary stories. The first chapter involves the greatest number of narrators: some two thousand jurors called upon to bear witness on the question of whether a given prospective heir had attained the legal age of inheritance. These Proofs of Age also offer the tiniest and most disjointed narratives that Rosenthal studies: the “tales” are characteristically no longer than a sentence offered to demonstrate what the juror was doing some twenty-one or fourteen years earlier when he learned of the birth of the claimant. When asked how he remembered the year of birth, a juror may respond that his brother was born on the same day as the claimant—or, more dramatically, that on a certain date, seeking help to hunt down the thieves who stole his horse, he entered a church to find its parishioners gathered for the claimant's baptism.

Rosenthal considers the jurors as prospective members of many communities. Calculating their ages, he determines that jurors did not constitute a distinct age cohort. Reviewing their social status, he finds the preponderance of lower-class men helpful in vocalizing the least-known segment of medieval society. On a third tack, he views each jury as a micro-community unto itself and rakes the records for evidence of how shared memories illustrate the interrelationships of individual jurors. More often, however, he takes a broader approach, linking all the records to universal experiences. Nearly three hundred jurors remembered the birth date of the heir because of its proximity to a birth, marriage, or death. Rosenthal occasionally compares his findings to the results of earlier scholarship: for example, about half of the jurors who spoke of their own marriages indicated that they had wed between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-three, in general conformation with the European marriage pattern. He determines that jurors recalled the deaths of children more often than those of other relatives, a fact that “reinforces the case of historians who argue for parental affection toward children in the period” (22). Such findings are not earthshaking, but they do tell us a bit more than we previously knew about the social textures of the times.

When Rosenthal addresses more detailed aspects of social life, his approach is seldom quantitative. He finds that baptism was the “activity most pertinent to fixing the memory of birth” (26) and, more specifically still, that godparents were usually named and their relationship to the juror described: significant evidence for the importance of this form of synthetic kinship. These unquantified observations are the richest elements of the study, and they lead me to believe that further quantification may have illuminated more than we find here. Is there enough information to coax out a richer portrait of the role of godfathers? I found little to distinguish Rosenthal's approach to these details from the centuries-old technique—practiced by Jusserand and Coulton, among many—of constructing social portraits from a few randomly selected vignettes. Because the Proof narratives are so tiny, their greatest documentary strength lies in their numbers, which Rosenthal stops tabulating at the very point when they might be most revealing.

The second point of focus, the Scropes-Grosvenor trial, is far more circumscribed than the Proofs in time, social range, and personnel. Rosenthal reviews the testimony of 209 witnesses who backed the 1386 suit of Sir Richard Scropes to secure the Scropes's exclusive ownership of their coat of arms. The cumulative testimony allows us to “reconstruct a fellowship of men in arms and recapture many of the shared … experiences that had once drawn the deponents together” (65). Rosenthal identifies leading themes articulated of the testimony. For example, the deponents continually spoke not only of Richard Scropes but also of his entire family, stretching back to, and beyond, the limits of the speaker's memory: “Clearly, this mutigenerational lore was part of the cultural baggage of the upper classes” (80). This section is the book's weakest: the least quantitative, the most generalized, and the least revealing. It neither cites nor benefits from the perspectives that Lee Patterson and others have brought to the same material.

The third study presents the book's sole female voice: Margaret, the most prolific of the epistolary Paston family. Her 104 letters come exclusively from the domestic sphere, unburdened by the legal frames that envelop the testimonies treated elsewhere. If not an authority figure, Margaret nevertheless “stands at the center” of her family as a “clearinghouse” for its discourse (101). Rosenthal launches his discussion with a painstaking exploration of the conventions of letter writing in her family. He provides hard evidence that Margaret “not only wrote a lot of letters but also tended to write letters of very considerable length” (116), a measure of “how seriously she took her duties” as the communications center of the Pastons. Rosenthal's analysis of Margaret's salutations, closings, and dating conventions and of the comparative roles of various family members in the letter-writing process is impeccably thorough and substantially longer than the sections devoted to the content of the letters themselves. This magnificent preparatory work gives way to a brief and perfunctory description of Margaret as a shopper and as a reporter of births, deaths, and other local news.

The strength of the Paston section lies in its treatment of writing conventions and not in any narrative told by Margaret or imposed by Rosenthal. A similar tendency to devote greater care to the construction of the records than to their contents pervades the book. Telling Tales is richest when showing how each set of records reveals something of the thought processes of the medieval narrators: how, for example, the Proofs continually pose the questions of “How do you remember, or why do you remember” without asking how the jurors measured the time that had passed since the occurrences that they cite as proofs (11). Rosenthal's masterful articulation of the processes through which these diverse documents were created enables him to suggest many potentially fruitful paths for exploring their content. If most of these paths remain unpursued, a way has been cleared for others to follow.