Necessary Conjunctions

In 1993 Professor Shaw published a study of the medieval city of Wells, The Creation of a Community (rev. ante, cxi (1996), 438–9), which more than many studies of individual towns cast light on English urban life as a whole. Here he has taken the process further, in a study still largely based on Wells evidence, but aiming to explore the ‘social self ’ (roughly, the public face of the individual) in English towns between about 1375 and 1520. A series of thematic chapters—on definitions and methodology, on urban values, peer pressures, and so on—is followed by a longer chapter which takes a series of men and women in Wells and constructs partial biographies of them to draw broader conclusions. The strengths of his approach are considerable. He uses other disciplines, and previous historical approaches such as Steven Rigby's on closure theory, and fully justifies his following of Rigby's dictum: ‘The choice is not whether to be theoretical or not, but whether or not we wish to become aware of the theories which we cannot avoid employing’. And, while grounding his arguments mainly on the evidence of Wells people (ranging from Bishop Bekynton to the intriguing figure of Cecily Pontefract ‘of evil repute’), he also displays a sure touch in drawing on much evidence from other towns. Yet he is in danger of overstating his case. He believes that some previous historians have ‘exaggerated the difficulty in recovering the mentality of the past’, but his most appropriate model for doing better, Robert Tittler's impressive Townspeople and Nation, draws on a later period when some individuals were better recorded. His own biographical sketches, which he claims go beyond previous scholars' attempts (p. 165), have inevitably to leave space for gaps and guesswork, and he concedes that one of his best-recorded people, Richard Ferrour, remains ‘still out of focus, riddled with black spots’ (p. 184). He also uses some literary evidence as historical evidence in a way that Rigby, in his Chaucer in Context (1996), a work he uses, warns against. Nevertheless, this is a bold and thought-provoking study of wide interest to all historians of later medieval England and beyond

Aesthetics · Art · Closure (psychology · Face (sociological concept · Political science · Social science · Sociology · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History

• Fragments from a medieval archive

  Open Access•Briony Mcdonagh•Journal of Historical Geography•2013

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