"Voices from the Bench" is a collection of microhistorical essays written by an internationally-known group of scholars specializing in medieval and early modern social history, covering Europe and Mesoamerica. Each essay focuses on formerly anonymous folk by providing a microhistorical portrait drawn from such judicial sources as canonization hearings, the trials of the Inquisition, chancery, criminal, royal, municipal and other courts. Women, Jews, New Christians, witches, servants, midwives, children, the possessed, peasants, shepherds and urban-dwellers are among the often marginalized figures whose daily lives, struggles, mores, and popular beliefs are brought to life through a close reading of these sources.
"Voices from the Bench" is a collection of microhistorical essays written by an internationally-known group of scholars specializing in medieval and early modern social history, covering Europe and Mesoamerica. Each essay focuses on formerly anonymous folk by providing a microhistorical portrait drawn from such judicial sources as canonization hearings, the trials of the Inquisition, chancery, criminal, royal, municipal and other courts. Women, Jews, New Christians, witches, servants, midwives, children, the possessed, peasants, shepherds and urban-dwellers are among the often marginalized figures whose daily lives, struggles, mores, and popular beliefs are brought to life through a close reading of these sources.
Introduction; M.Goodich Microhistory and the Taste for Details in the Judicial Narratives of Canonization Trials and Witch Trials; G.Klaniczay The Inquisitor and the Shepherd; Or, Inside and Outside Pierre Maury; J.H.Arnold Attesting the Ordinary: Oral and Personal History in the Records of English Ecclesiastical Courts; R.Swanson The World of Witnesses and the Holy Tribunal: 15th Century Trials of Castilian Judaizers; R.L.Melammed A Case of Demonic Possession in Fifteenth-Century Brittany: Perrinus Hervei and the Nascent Cult of Vincent Ferrer; L.Smoller A Rape Trial in Saint Eloi: Sex, Seduction and Justice in the Seigneurial Courts of Medieval Paris; E.R.Yahil The Multiple Miseries of Dulcia of St. Chartier (1266), Jeanne Laboysans of Crosses (1266) and Cristina of Wellington (1294); M.Goodich The Toddler in the Ditch: Parental Negligence?; R.Finucane The Customs and Symbolism of Consumption: Food and Wine in Witness Depositions from Late Medieval Marseille; D.L.Smail Conflicting Narratives: Two Women in Chancery, c. 1493-1500; C.Beattie The Inquisitorial Perspectives of an Unmarried Mulatta Woman in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Mexico; A.Megged
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MICHAEL GOODICH is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Haifa, Israel.
'The essays in this volume reconstruct good stories from the archives, and tell them well. In bringing to light these individual cases, they also give us information about a wide range of other topics, including family relationships, daily life, ideas about sainthood, and magic...Taken together, they offer a set of fascinating snippets of what can be found in medieval archives.' - Archives: The journal of the British Records Association
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