Peasant life in the medieval West (review)

188 Reviews in the remaining essay on Middle English, finds positive reasons for Malory's reluctance to show Launcelot and Guinevere abed togydirs. The four other contributions, all deding with the m o d e m period, are a mixed bag. Don Anderson's piece on usage, with which the collection unhappily opens, is a reprinted newspaper article riddled with infelicities grosser than those it pretends not to pillory. ('How can I deplore "quote" being used as a noun when that scourge of the tautology, Alex Buzo, does just that...?' But even those who accept this treatement of being as a participle rather than a verbd noun must wonder what it is that Buzo does. Does he use 'quote' as a noun or does he deplore such a usage? The context requires the former; the syntax the latter.) John Gunn discourses chattily on terms associated with beer-drinking in this thirstiest of continents. Robert Eagleson shows how linguistic evidence was used in a recent homicide trial to prove that the accused was himself the author of a typewritten 'farewell' letter which he cldmed had been written by his wife before her disappearance. This compelling topic cries out for the full supporting evidence -the complete texts of the letter in question and of the accompanying samples of the couple's writings (as opposed merely to the brief quotations we are given from them). Such evidence, amounting to some nine and a half thousand words (p. 22), could profitably have been included instead of Michael Wilding's twelve-lhousand-word article, with which the book concludes, on Christina Stead's political vision in The Puzzleheaded Girl. This has no proper place, whatever its intrinsic merit, in a collection entitled Words and Wordsmiths. Nonetheless, Leslie Rogers must be delighted with this volume in his honour. It beds eloquent testimony lo 'the wide range of [his] teaching and research interests and the scholarship which he has inspired in succeeding generations of students and amongst his collegues' (p. iii). T. L. Burton Department of English Language and Literature University of Adeldde SHORT NOTICES Fossier, R., Peasant life in the medieval West, trans. J. Vale, Oxford, Blackwell, 1988; pp. 215; R.R.P. A U S $65.00 This excellent book has been available for some years in the origind French. It is a pleasure now to sec an English translation, especially one by Juliet V d e , no mean historian in her own right and who has brought several French medievdists to a wider public. This is a reminder that small books (it contains less than 200 pages of text) can still be written about large subjects without Reviews 189 being distorted by bombast or rendered insipid by bland generalities. Indeed, dthough Fossier's chronological canvas is rather more limited than Georges Duby's much bulkier Rural Economy and Country Lifew in the Medieval West, his geographicd scope is larger; incorporating Spdn and Italy. H o w is this feat of synthesis achieved? By focussing on areas of recent research, particularly in the field of village archaeology; by being unembarrassed by questions which have, as yet, no answers (like Marc Bloch, he litters his text with questionmarks ); and by being engagingly frank (shades, agdn, of Bloch) with a reader for w h o m great things are expected in terms of future research. The emphasis, as with Duby, is on France; but who can blame them when possibly as many as one person in every two in the medieval west was French? There are inevitable infelicities in translation, such as the boys and girls dancing and coupling on the threshing floor, 'to beat the grain', (p. 42), but these are rare. Nicholas Wright Department of History University of Adeldde Goodman, A., The new monarchy: England 1471-1534 (Historical Association Studies), Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988; pp. 89; R.R.P. A U S $12.95. The Historical Association Studies are brief surveys of recent thinking on classicd topoi in History. Anthony Goodman, in considering the phenomenon dubbed the new monarchy, has produced a useful overview of the revisions in the conceptualizing of the role of monarchy developed in the last 10 to 15 years. Given the...