Volume 33, Number 21 & 22 · January 15, 1987
Neediest Cases
By Maurice Keen
The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History
by Michel Mollat, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Yale University Press, 336 pp., $30.00
A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Medieval Life
by Margaret Wade Labarge
Beacon Press, 271 pp., $21.95
'The poet Gray was wrong,' the late Peter Fleming once remarked, 'anyone who has had much conversation with the poor will know that their annals are neither short nor simple.' But Gray was right about the thinness of the record that they leave behind when they are gone, and that record becomes scantier as one moves back in time. The subjects of Professor Mollat's excellent book, The Poor in the Middle Ages, died so long ago that we can now perceive only their collective face, not the individual ones, and we see them, perforce, rather as others saw them than as they saw themselves. His book is in consequence in many ways as much a history of charity (and the lack of it) as of poverty. It is also, it must be said, substantially a collective work, synthesizing the varied findings of contributors to the Sorbonne seminar over which he presided for many years. Sometimes the differing preoccupations of these contributors show through the synthesis, but the book is not any the less interesting for that.
Review, 2912 words
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