This is an important book. It describes and evaluates a category of sources that has not hitherto been taken as seriously as it deserves, and it shows how these can add to our knowledge of some key themes and problems of the later middle ages. The volume shows their potential and provides signposts to the sources themselves and to the methods which can be used to analyse and illuminate them. Collectively, these essays are more than just a study of a category of sources, but are much more akin to a guide, in the way that Zvi Razi and Richard Smith’s Medieval Society and the Manor Court (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), has become the essential starting point for discussions about manorial court records. The book is concerned with the surviving records of medieval town courts. There are substantial historiographical problems with these sources, for they have never been studied to the same extent as the records of manorial courts, and so are much less understood. Yet there is also a challenge in these sources themselves, for they are much more variable than their manorial equivalents. There was no standard template for town courts, but the number, scope and relationships of urban courts were products of local circumstances and could differ radically from one town to the next. The relative uniformity of manorial courts was underpinned by the literature—items such as the Court Baron tracts— that told their holders how to run them, but there was nothing akin to this for urban courts. This structure in the sources presents problems and opportunities. It means that it is often hard to compare courts in different towns, but it also means that the structure and assumptions of the courts often have an interest beyond the legal. The volume approaches these problems through an introduction, ten essays, and an appendix. They might be divided into two groups; those that analyse the structure of the evidence itself, and those that provide instructive case studies in how it might be read. The first group is somewhat the smaller. The introduction by Goddard and Phipps sets the agenda for the volume as a whole in that it defines the problem and the scope of the book. The focus lies on the rolls that reflect the regular activity of the courts, and not on the custumals that define and record the practices of the towns themselves. Concentration on the rolls to the exclusion of the custumals is understandable as a means for making this book coherent and moderate in size, though it does mean that the most important cognate set of documents is not much covered here. The essay by Kowaleski is the first chapter and the most ambitious in the book, in that it surveys the surviving evidence including its gaps and shortcomings, before attempting an outline typology of courts (with allowance for the variable structures between towns), before defining the main research questions. She notes

中文翻译：

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中世纪晚期英格兰的城镇法院和城市社会，1250-1500

这是一本重要的书。它描述和评估了迄今为止尚未得到应有重视的一类资料，并展示了这些资料如何增加我们对中世纪后期一些关键主题和问题的了解。该卷展示了它们的潜力，并为来源本身以及可用于分析和阐明它们的方法提供了路标。总的来说，这些论文不仅仅是对一类来源的研究，而且更类似于指南，就像 Zvi Razi 和 Richard Smith 的中世纪社会和庄园法院（牛津：牛津大学出版社，1996 年）一样，已成为讨论庄园法庭记录的重要起点。这本书与中世纪城镇法院的幸存记录有关。这些资料存在大量的史学问题，因为它们从未像庄园法庭的记录那样被研究到相同的程度，因此很少被理解。然而，这些来源本身也存在挑战，因为它们比庄园等价物的变化大得多。镇法院没有标准模板，但城市法院的数量、范围和关系是因地制宜的，可能因城镇而异。庄园法院的相对统一性得到了文献（例如宫廷男爵传单）的支持，这些文献告诉他们的持有人如何管理它们，但城市法院没有类似的东西。来源中的这种结构带来了问题和机遇。这意味着通常很难比较不同城镇的法院，但这也意味着法院的结构和假设往往具有超出法律范围的利益。该卷通过介绍、十篇文章和附录来解决这些问题。他们可能分为两组；那些分析证据本身结构的那些，以及那些提供关于如何阅读它的指导性案例研究的那些。第一组稍微小一些。Goddard 和 Phipps 的引言设定了整卷的议程，因为它定义了本书的问题和范围。重点在于反映法院常规活动的卷册，而不是定义和记录城镇本身做法的习俗。专注于卷而排除习惯是可以理解的，这是使本书连贯且大小适中的一种手段，尽管这确实意味着最重要的同源文档集在这里没有太多涉及。Kowaleski 的文章是本书的第一章，也是最雄心勃勃的一章，因为它在尝试概述法院类型学（考虑到城镇之间的可变结构）之前，调查了现存的证据，包括其差距和缺点，然后定义了主要研究问题。她注意到