Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part III. Edited by Richard Beadle and Colin Richmond. Early English Text Society, s.s. 22. Oxford: the Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2005. Pp. ciii + 319 + 6 plates. $125.

This volume completes a project launched over 50 years ago: it follows on the heels of the two volumes (Parts I and II) of Paston Letters and Papers that Norman Davis edited and published in 1971–76. But, as the editors tell us in quoting Davis, the two volumes of the 1970s were almost 20 years in the making and they came about as they did because Davis, in conjunction with Bruce McFarlane of Magdalen College, Oxford, had planned a joint effort that would combine a study of the text and language of the Paston family letters and papers with an elaborate explication of their historical and social context (as nouveau and pushy gentry of East Anglia during the Wars of the Roses). But McFarlane, the dominant fifteenth century historian of recent times, was not a great finisher of projects and Davis—left much on his own for the two volumes he published—was not deeply concerned to link the Pastons with Sir John Fastolf's affairs and estate, certainly not to the degree that the inclusion of so many of Fastolf's papers would have made feasible, had that been his focus and as it is in this volume. Furthermore, Davis's decision to publish the letters as grouped by each Paston letter-writer and then, in his second volume, by each Paston recipient of letters—rather than in some overall chronological order—turned the spotlight on each member of the family while deflecting some of our attention from the on-going and collective enterprises of the family (which were to acquire as much property as possible—especially that of the Fastolf estate after old Sir John died in 1459).

Joel T. Rosenthal
State University of New York at Stony Brook