Commanding Communications: the Fifteenth-Century Letters of the Stonor Women

Abstract

Letters can offer unique insight into people’s lives, especially when the writers are no longer able to provide spoken accounts of their experiences. Annotated collections of correspondence by famous individuals have always been popular, as much for their entertainment value as their historical content, satisfying human curiosity while providing social analysts with potentially important source material. Private papers of all kinds are especially valuable when they concern those who are otherwise relatively hidden from the scholar’s view. This is especially true in the case of medieval women. Their undeniably disadvantaged position in society inevitably led to their absence in many documents dating from the period, the majority of which were produced by official institutions in which women had no role. Images and descriptions of the late medieval female are numerous in literary and religious texts, but all too often depict women as either weak and dangerously distracting, like Eve, or divinely virtuous, blameless creatures, like the Virgin Mary. Even when medieval authors chose to depart from such stereotypes, literary intentions often conspire to provide us with less than typical examples of women’s experiences. In order to understand the reality behind such texts, it is necessary to read documents that are less reliant on literary conventions, and, ideally, those that women themselves had a role in creating.