Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages

Jeremy Goldberg is Reader in Medieval History at the University of York.

• Alice de Rouclif: An Eventful Childhood William Pottell: Stories and Storytellers Ellen Taliour: Gender and the Remembrance of Times Past Robert Thewed: The Ties of Tenure and Locality Anabilla Wastelyne: The Ties of Kinship Dom. William Marrays: Stories and Readers Alice Through the Looking Glass Brewing Trouble: The Devout Widow's Tale Patriarchy, Civic Identity and the Widow of Doncaster

"Goldberg's book has a little of everything - detailed archival work, courtroom drama, theoretical speculation, microhistory, macrohistory, every social class possible and plenty of gender groups, biography, and late medieval England, all in the service of a question about the legal history of rape. It's like a stylistic melding of Natalie Zemon Davis's Martin Guerre with Duby's William Marshal: Flower of Chivalry. The cast of characters in the beginning is a great touch." - Bonnie Wheeler, English and Medieval Studies, Southern Methodist University"The book gives us a good picture of how a court case of this sort worked in practice, with lots of insights into actual and potential complications on the societal and legal levels." - Speculum"Goldberg's study will be of great interest to specialists of pre-modern canon law, especially in regard to women's right to choose to marry or to have sex, as well as to the power men may exercise over them. In this regard, Jermey Goldberg's thorough investigation is truly illuminating, not only for its patient and precise reconstructions but also for its numerous and extremely carefully examined sources, and for the forty pages of endnotes that constitute a fascinating cornucopia of further reflections and discussions." - Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching