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Reviewed by:
  • Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women, and Testimony in the Church Courts, c. 1200–1500 by Bronach C. Kane
  • Katie Barclay
Kane, Bronach C., Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women, and Testimony in the Church Courts, c. 1200–1500 (Gender in the Middle Ages, 13), Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 309; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781783273522.

How do we remember? In Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England, Bronach Kane explores how memory is deployed by lower-status people in church court testimony, particularly attending to memory as an embodied, material practice. As the gender in the title suggests, this book considers how men and women remembered the past differently from each other, but its achievement is much more significant than this might suggest. In writing a history of how ordinary people remember, we learn of memory as not just a process of thought but as bound up with and emerging through the body, environments, and everyday life. Memory studies is a huge area of research, but attention to memory practices amongst medieval and early modern people has been a more modest endeavour. Popular Memory can be situated alongside works such as Andy Wood’s The Memory of the People that move from memory as an exploration of what is retained and forgotten and its relationship to power and nation-building, to memory as something of the everyday and the local. [End Page 218]

Popular Memory is a substantial book, with seven chapters, and a scholarly introduction and conclusion. It begins with a discussion of how canon law, the legal context of the evidentiary base of the volume, understood and acknowledged memory as a form of legal proof and the (limited) role it allowed for women in providing legal testimony. The remainder of the book explores the different ways that memory was presented within the courts by witnesses to legal cases and how it was given authoritative force. Ranging across themes of sexuality and sex, gendered and especially reproductive bodies, birth, marriage, and death, written memory and orality, and finally place and landscape, Popular Memory highlights how the legal evidence—accounts of things seen, thought, felt—were articulated through the mundane and embodied experiences of everyday life. The birth of a child or a wedding became ways to assuredly affirm the dating of a particular event; courts recognized these social facts as memorable for the individual and so they could become anchors that other pieces of evidence could be tied to and made legally compelling. Similarly, descriptions of place and landscape or material items gave weight to testimony, offering explanations as to why certain types of information were known and retained. In doing so, memory was made authoritative through being embedded in the personal and, in particular, in the rhythms of family life and labour.

It is perhaps not surprising therefore that memory was a gendered practice. The lives of men and women, their experiences of sex, reproduction, marriage, work, and property use, were shaped by gender, and so the contours of their testimony, and capacity to speak authoritatively in particular areas, reflected these gendered experiences. As Popular Memory suggests, this was not entirely transparent. Men were not only allowed to speak to a wider range of topics and types of legal case, but had greater literacy levels, enabling them to use writing more readily to affirm their memory practices, and were generally considered more reliable witnesses. At times, this allowed their memories to be given greater weight than those of a wife or similar female family member, even in cases where women might have been thought to have more reliable memory experiences (such as a husband countering his wife’s dating of childbirth). Yet, as this book shows, if patriarchal norms gave broad shape to the operation of the law, testimony and the gendered experience of memory also offered opportunities to contest, resist, and negotiate power structures. Personal stories, recounted through embodied histories, offered a type of agency for the lower orders.

This overview does not do justice to this book. What makes it a rich and fascinating contribution to the field is not just the larger...

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