Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England. By Joel T. Rosenthal. University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2003. Pp. xxv + 217. $49.95.

This volume, part of Penn State University Press's extensive and varied offerings in medieval history, represents an attempt to advance our understanding of everyday life by, as the author puts it, "a close reading of various kinds of testimony, memory, and narrative." Such a close reading permits us to reconstruct, "by way of eavesdropping, a synthetic tale of the relationships and interactions of daily life" (p. xiii). Here is another example of the cultural history approaches that are increasingly being adopted by social historians and others to "flesh out" or humanize the histories assembled mostly by documents of institutional provenance, especially as concerns the experience of the majority. Here, Rosenthal's goal is to analyze the records for the details of life that they (sometimes adventitiously) preserve, and also to read those records as emanating from a social experience that we can at least partly uncover in the evidence. Rosenthal's methodology and findings are reminiscent of the work of Barbara Hanawalt, whom he names as one of the authors who provided inspiration for this book. Hanawalt's work on coroners' rolls similarly provides vivid "snapshots" in time, conveying the "overwhelming sense of being at the scene," as she wrote in Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (1986).

Sherri Olson
University of Connecticut