The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: Endings (review)

The Paston family, gentry of fifteenth-century Norfolk, left behind a prolific correspondence, and Richmond is the latest of many historians who have used the letters to evoke the individuals and the social movements, the conflicts and the bonds that characterized their society. Prodigiously footnoted and thoroughly hedged with "probably" and "one supposes," the book, like Richmond's two other volumes on the Pastons, sets out the limits of what we can know (in the historian's traditional sense) about them and suggests a range of possibilities for how medieval people thought about their world. Historians need look no further for a thorough analysis of this important body of material. One could wish that in addition Richmond, who is also a writer of fiction, would use his unparalleled knowledge of these characters and their environment to embrace his surmises and tell the Pastons' story as a novel.