Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 2 (2020), p. 313

This book sets out a compelling case for the importance of memory to popular culture in later medieval England. Where much recent historical writing on memory in the Middle Ages has focused on elite and learned contexts, it reveals the mnemonic strategies and markers used by ordinary rural men and women to remember and narrate their own lives. More particularly, it shows the way in which these strategies helped to reproduce the patriarchal ideas about authority, gender, and social relations that structured everyday life. The result is a richly detailed social history that displays a deep sensitivity to its subjects’ world-views.

Most of the research underlying this comes from a study of witness depositions produced in the course of litigation before the church courts of Canterbury and York, relating to disputes over marriage, defamation, and tithes, among other matters. These are technical and often complicated sources, which provide only brief and highly partial glimpses of the voices of the people who were called to testify. But throughout, Kane provides careful readings of the vignettes that they offer, seizing upon the telling details that take us beyond the formulaic language of the legal Latin, towards the lived experiences of the witnesses themselves.

After an introduction that makes clear the historiographical stakes in relation to medieval social history and memory studies, the first two chapters provide a survey of the two broad cultural contexts. Chapter 1 looks at the way in which ecclesiastical discourses about memory developed in both pastoral and judicial settings, influencing the way that witness testimonies were elicited in the courts, while Chapter 2 explores the ideas about female authority that emerge from legal arguments over the capacity of individual women to act as witnesses before the courts. While we might be unsurprised to find that these arguments drew on misogynistic tropes about female promiscuity and deceit, Kane also attempts to recover the affective networks of female kinship and sociability from which women often narrativized their memories.

The subsequent five chapters explore diverse themes, showing the ways in which memories of everyday life were grounded in ideas and experiences surrounding bodies and sexuality, kinship and marriage, custom and writing, and movement through the landscape. Readers of this journal will no doubt be especially interested in this last chapter, which brings together an array of evidence – much of it from tithe causes – showing the importance of the connection between memory and place; in line with recent work on early-modern England, it demonstrates that the agricultural landscape was understood as a repository of customary memory. But here as throughout, Kane’s emphasis on gender also provides new insights into these familiar topics, showing the way that patriarchal ideas about authority leeched into every aspect of the way that people remembered.

The book is full of tantalizing arguments, such as the idea that men and women constructed different temporalities in their depositions, the men’s more linear, the women’s more synchronic – or that women tended to remember with reference to bodies, aligning with normative perceptions of female social experience as embodied. Indeed, if the book has a flaw it is that such insights were sometimes left hanging, when they would have repaid more investigation; it seemed to me that they deserved more space, possibly at the expense of the literature surveys that opened most of the chapters. Nonetheless, there were other subplots that were pursued effectively throughout, such as the way that women’s memories often provided the foundation for those of men, even while they themselves were (informally) excluded from providing testimony in certain kinds of cases, such as those that concerned tithes or ecclesiastical rights.

Overall, the book represents a timely contribution to medieval English social history. Its attention to the way that medieval patriarchy contoured the structures of everyday rural life is illuminating, and it will be especially useful for teaching students about the ways in which gendered patterns of authority might marginalize men – particularly younger, poorer, and servile men – as well as women. In its main aspect, it shows the possibility of studying popular memory in the Middle Ages in a way that is mindful of the particularities of individual experience while still sufficiently broad to draw out a powerful cultural history. And in its suggestions around the forms of temporality, embodiment, and affect, it signals future directions for studies that seek to uncover the memories of non-elite people in the medieval world.