Petitions are everywhere at the moment. Petitions about government policy, about climate change, even about the naming of scientific research ships. So it was with some prescience that in the early 2000s, Mark Ormrod and Gwilym Dodd started to reinvigorate interest in medieval petitioning with the first digitization and detailed cataloguing of The National Archives’ Ancient Petitions class, some seventeen thousand petitions in total, a project that opened up this illuminating source to a wide selection of scholars, students, and the general public. By focusing their efforts not on the voices of those who decided, but on those who asked, they offered a very contemporary take on medieval documentation. As a result of their endeavors, there has been much recent petition-based publication, to which Petitions and Strategies of Persuasion in the Middle Ages is a very welcome addition.

Dodd's consideration of the use of language, and the textual provenance of petitions, starts off the contributions. His examination of, often quite vivid, English in parliamentary petitions in particular draws out both themes, emphasizing not only the connections between language, testimonial, and content of petitions, but also the issue of spoken and heard text. One wonders how much more could come out of such petitions with more in-depth examination of regional dialect and word usage, as well as more consideration of the status of petitioners. Helen Lacey's chapter looks at pardoning resulting from petitioning, including persuasive and performative elements, but also, and very interestingly, how petitioners could work to deny pardons to other petitioners. Here, the mentions of gender, geography, and social level in Lacey's discussion of “supplicatory culture” (41) get the reader thinking about what further numerical analysis of both petitioners and intercessors and intermediaries, especially considering the continued role of the king's personal authority, might yield. Helen Killick, on the other hand, does examine the issue of geography, looking at where those writing up the petitions were based—around the locale of the individual or within a set of busy Westminster scribes (including Thomas Hoccleve)—and who those scribes were. It seems, going from Killick's analysis of dialect, that local scribes were more often used, something that could be usefully tied back a bit more to Dodd's chapter. The importance of access to the petitioning system is developed by Anthony Musson in a different way, who finds that knowledge of the law was much more wide-ranging (if not always accurate) than one might have expected. Here, aside from some obvious links back to Lacey's discussion of persuasive devices, further thought about the set pieces of fourteenth-century history (the Great Famine, the Black Death, 1381), and their relationship to use of historical legal knowledge, could perhaps yield dividends.

Matthew Phillips shifts to the other main focus of the volume, the ecclesiastical world, with his study of the bishop of Durham's response to the effects of the Scottish wars, and, in particular, how the bishop manipulated the petitioning system with considerable foresight and aplomb. He examines the historical context for the petitions (something that could perhaps have been done in slightly more detail in some of the other chapters), finding that successful petitioning was often as much a question of timing and influence as anything else. Shelagh Sneedon stays with the church, comparing the strategies of Jedburgh and Arbroath abbeys concerning lost rights over English churches. Though sets of both petitions were well honed, Sneedon finds what really made or broke both cases was the political situation, and in particular the often unforeseen implications of the “Shameful Peace” of 1328 (also important for Phillips's discussion). One wonders with both these chapters whether their conclusions could again be usefully put within the wider context of the church in the early fourteenth-century “crisis.”

Philippa Hoskin widens the discussion back out, in this case looking at the relationship between church and state, and petitioning concerning lay invasion of church property, in which she finds for the importance of rights and ownership over local anticlericalism. Here it might be worthwhile revisiting the debate around the seriousness of trespass vi et armis in the fourteenth century when thinking about the later development of de vi laica amovenda. Thomas Smith, on the other hand, focuses on how thirteenth-century English clergy navigated the often quite arduous complexities of the papal supplicatory system to gain control of benefices, and even to halt papal provision, both through petitioning itself and through the use of appeal. The works of A. K. McHardy and David Robinson on ecclesiastical careers in the fourteenth century might make for useful comparison.

The final two chapters of the volume focus on more personal events. Frederik Pedersen examines marriage through the cases in the York Cause Papers, finding, as with Musson, how ordinary subjects of the king proved themselves somewhat more knowledgeable about the law than often thought, though Pedersen also warns the court's selection and verification system of evidence needs to be kept in mind. In a different vein, Kirsi Salonen focuses on the issue of clergy who killed, and how they tried to explain these acts by petitions to the pope, something that, while aided by expert advice, was nonetheless driven by the wills of the petitioners themselves. Both pieces, while clearly valuable in themselves, could also be put a bit more firmly in the historiographies of marriage and homicide.

Overall, the collection's strength lies not just in the individual chapters—all of which are well researched and effectively argued and, as I hope I have shown, thought provoking—but in the sum effect of the volume. It brings the technical, theoretical and practical aspects of both secular and ecclesiastical petitioning together in a very effective package—so much so that, aside from more cross-referencing within the volume, I also feel that a “where from here” chapter might have been useful at the end. Apart from the index, which at a little over one page is far too brief, this is a very worthwhile volume, giving a diverse yet rounded sense of the issue of “voice” in medieval petitions.