Reviewed by:

• Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women, and Testimony in the Church Courts, c. 1200–1500 by Bronach C. Kane
• Katie Barclay

How do we remember? In Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England, Bronach Kane explores how memory is deployed by lower-status people in church court testimony, particularly attending to memory as an embodied, material practice. As the gender in the title suggests, this book considers how men and women remembered the past differently from each other, but its achievement is much more significant than this might suggest. In writing a history of how ordinary people remember, we learn of memory as not just a process of thought but as bound up with and emerging through the body, environments, and everyday life. Memory studies is a huge area of research, but attention to memory practices amongst medieval and early modern people has been a more modest endeavour. Popular Memory can be situated alongside works such as Andy Wood’s The Memory of the People that move from memory as an exploration of what is retained and forgotten and its relationship to power and nation-building, to memory as something of the everyday and the local. [End Page 218]

Popular Memory is a substantial book, with seven chapters, and a scholarly introduction and conclusion. It begins with a discussion of how canon law, the legal context of the evidentiary base of the volume, understood and acknowledged memory as a form of legal proof and the (limited) role it allowed for women in providing legal testimony. The remainder of the book explores the different ways that memory was presented within the courts by witnesses to legal cases and how it was given authoritative force. Ranging across themes of sexuality and sex, gendered and especially reproductive bodies, birth, marriage, and death, written memory and orality, and finally place and landscape, Popular Memory highlights how the legal evidence—accounts of things seen, thought, felt—were articulated through the mundane and embodied experiences of everyday life. The birth of a child or a wedding became ways to assuredly affirm the dating of a particular event; courts recognized these social facts as memorable for the individual and so they could become anchors that other pieces of evidence could be tied to and made legally compelling. Similarly, descriptions of place and landscape or material items gave weight to testimony, offering explanations as to why certain types of information were known and retained. In doing so, memory was made authoritative through being embedded in the personal and, in particular, in the rhythms of family life and labour.

It is perhaps not surprising therefore that memory was a gendered practice. The lives of men and women, their experiences of sex, reproduction, marriage, work, and property use, were shaped by gender, and so the contours of their testimony, and capacity to speak authoritatively in particular areas, reflected these gendered experiences. As Popular Memory suggests, this was not entirely transparent. Men were not only allowed to speak to a wider range of topics and types of legal case, but had greater literacy levels, enabling them to use writing more readily to affirm their memory practices, and were generally considered more reliable witnesses. At times, this allowed their memories to be given greater weight than those of a wife or similar female family member, even in cases where women might have been thought to have more reliable memory experiences (such as a husband countering his wife’s dating of childbirth). Yet, as this book shows, if patriarchal norms gave broad shape to the operation of the law, testimony and the gendered experience of memory also offered opportunities to contest, resist, and negotiate power structures. Personal stories, recounted through embodied histories, offered a type of agency for the lower orders.

This overview does not do justice to this book. What makes it a rich and fascinating contribution to the field is not just the larger...

审核人：

• 中世纪英格兰的大众记忆和性别：教堂法院中的男人，女人和证词，c。1200-1500通过Bronach C.凯恩
• 凯蒂·巴克莱（Katie Barclay）

我们如何记得？在民间记忆和中世纪英国性别，Bronach凯恩探讨如何内存是由地位较低的人在教会法庭上作证部署，特别是参加内存作为一个体现，材料的做法。就像标题中的性别所暗示的那样，这本书考虑了男人和女人如何以不同的方式回忆过去，但其成就远不止于此。在写有关普通人记忆方式的历史时，我们不仅将记忆视为思维过程，而且还将其与身体，环境和日常生活紧密结合并不断涌现。记忆研究是一个巨大的研究领域，但是对中世纪和早期现代人的记忆实践的关注却较为温和。流行记忆可以与安迪·伍德（Andy Wood）的《人民的记忆》并排放置，这些记忆从记忆开始，探寻保留和遗忘的事物及其与权力和国家建设的关系，再到记忆作为日常和当地事物。[结束第218页]

《大众记忆》是一本实质性的书，共七章，并提供学术上的介绍和结论。首先讨论佳能法律，该卷证据基础的法律背景，如何理解和承认记忆是一种法律证明形式以及它在妇女提供法律证明方面的（有限）作用。该书的其余部分探讨了法律案件的证人在法院内提出记忆的不同方式以及如何赋予其权威。涉及性与性，性别尤其是生殖器官，出生，婚姻和死亡，书面记忆和口头表达，最后是地点和风景的主题，流行记忆着重强调如何通过日常生活中平凡而具体的经验来表达法律证据（包括所见，所想，所感觉到的事情）。孩子的出生或婚礼成为肯定地确定特定事件的日期的方式；法院认为这些社会事实对个人而言是令人难忘的，因此它们可以成为其他证据可能与之相关并在法律上具有说服力的基础。同样，对地点和风景或物质物品的描述也加重了证词，并解释了为何知道并保留某些类型的信息。这样，通过将记忆嵌入个人，尤其是融入家庭生活和劳动节奏，可以使记忆具有权威性。

因此，记忆是一种性别习惯，也许并不奇怪。男女的生活，性，生殖，婚姻，工作和财产使用的经历，都是由性别决定的，因此，他们的证词轮廓以及在特定领域进行权威表达的能力反映了这些性别经历。作为流行记忆这表明这并不完全透明。人们不仅被允许谈论广泛的话题和法律案件类型，而且他们具有更高的读写水平，使他们能够更容易地使用书写来肯定自己的记忆习惯，并且通常被认为是更可靠的证人。有时，这使他们的记忆比妻子或类似女性家庭成员的记忆更重要，即使在某些情况下，人们可能认为妇女拥有更可靠的记忆经验（例如丈夫反对妻子的分娩日期） 。但是，正如这本书所表明的那样，如果父权制规范在法律的实施中得到广泛应用，则证词和性别的记忆经验也为竞争，抵抗和谈判权力结构提供了机会。通过具体历史回顾个人故事，

此概述与本书不符。使它在该领域做出丰富而引人入胜的贡献的不仅是更大的……