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University Distinguished Lecture
Telling Stories in Medieval English Courts:
Whose Voices Do We Hear?
ABSTRACT
Economic, social, and cultural historians confront the problem of
establishing narratives, evoking personal experiences, and trying to
find broader patterns and trends out of the obscure records of various
written court records. Sometimes, but not often, storytellers were
literate. Often their testimony was given in English and translated
into French, the language the judges used, and then written down in
Latin, which was the language of the court.
Could the victim or the accused understand the language of the court
as they stood before the bar? How do we know about these people,
speaking in their own vernacular language, but filtered through
official Latin translations, formulas of testimony, questioning by
inquisitors, and distortions of scribes charged with recording the
information?
It is the sense of solving mysteries that keeps researchers going back
to archives hoping to find some insight into daily life. We want to
know people's attitudes toward personal affront or calumny, loss of
life and property, and love. Could some emotional statement slip
through the official record and give us, in the twenty-first century,
some voice of the past? We also want to know who was listening at the
time to these people who tell their tales of woe, of folly, of good
intentions or bad. These people had an audience to whom they told
their tales. What was the audience to take away? In accidental
deaths, perhaps a didactic lesson is learned about the dangers of
certain activities. In the case of a rape, the warning might be to
young girls about dangerous places or times of day. In murders
trials, the story might be an exculpating one. The stories were told
repeatedly among community members and were woven into the number of
tales that circulated and provided entertainment, education, and oral
histories. We will, in this hour, listen to some of their stories.
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