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In this article, I address the use of witness testimony by medieval and early-modern historians of England. Although the idea that such evidence straightforwardly represents the thoughts and feelings of quite lowly people has long been discredited, I think that some part of this assumption still haunts the thinking of our postmodern, or cultural turn, historiography. To put it rather too bluntly: the old, empiricist quest for “real voices” in testimonies has to some extent been replaced by a contemporary quest for “real discourses.” That is to say, the utilization of testimonies by historians often seems to boil down to the careful extraction of the particular discourse under examination—gender, class, childhood—from the legal discourses acknowledged to be inherent in witness testimonies produced in law courts. Now, this is a severely reductionist account, and later I will elaborate on the varieties and subtleties of current approaches. Nonetheless, this assumption that we can simply extrapolate social discourses about “x” from the legal discourses of the depositions seems to me somewhat flawed, because it presumes that premodern witnesses were simply conduits of discourse, whose testimony was nonetheless decisively shaped by the machinations of the legal counsel. In fact, as I will argue here, medieval witnesses were quite capable of manipulating such discourses, using clichés to tell the court what they thought it wanted to hear. In the subsequent discussion, I will look in detail at two intimately related cases from the Bishop of London's consistory court to make this point more explicit. First, I will relate the basic facts of these cases: the narrative of the events and the procedure of the courts. I will then address the historiography of witness testimony in greater detail, at the same time demonstrating the way in which the examples from the consistory counter the assumptions of this historiography. I will present different ways of reading my own examples using different positions within the scholarly literature, before showing how the case upsets even the most sophisticated of such readings. Overall, I argue that as well as considering the “construction” of the testimony by lawyers and legal counsels, and the “deconstruction” of such discourses by historians, we must begin to think about the “preconstruction” of the testimony by witnesses; their own integration of legalistic ideas into the fabric of their depositions. Finally, I will conclude by considering some of the wider implications of this argument for the use of witness depositions, and for the study of “law and society” more generally in the medieval and early-modern periods.

Shepard examines the language of self-description adopted by men and women of limited means, of whom there were growing ranks in early modern English. Despite their expanding numbers, as well as intensified social commentary on the problems of poverty, the 'voices of the poor' themselves have remained largely muffled, audible only in relation to (and deeply shaped by) the highly strategic negotia- tions of formal poor relief. Of course the responses of witnesses to the question of their worth were not unmediated by the courts, but this enquiry was not as critical a moment of negotiation as petitions for relief because the outcome of these causes (the majority of which did not proceed to judgement) mostly did not have a direct bearing on the material well-being of respondents.

As he explained in his suicide note, abbé Jean-Baptiste Rousseau could not marry and would not seduce the young woman he loved, so he shot himself on 18 May 1784. Witnesses deposed by the police claimed that he was not in his right mind and therefore not legally responsible for his actions, but the authors of contemporary reports about the case accepted his lucid account of his dilemma. Nouvellistes and journalists provided multiple versions of his note and multiple judgments of his motives, options, and actions. This analysis of the sources from 1784 and the following years shows how they reworked the story of Rousseau's life and death against the background of larger issues. Changes in jurisprudence during the last decades of the ancien régime culminated in the decriminalization of suicide and other religious, moral, and sexual crimes in 1791. Debates about the causes and meanings of self-destruction continued, but in the press rather than the courts.

Theearly modern sermonhas enjoyed a relatively sudden access of scholarly visibility and respectability over recent decades. The form of thesermon, thephysical contexts of preaching, and the content of the message have all attracted increased attention and fruitful engagement. There remains, however, a great deal of work to be done to reorient the study of theCaroline sermonaway from its current focus on preaching in elite settings to include sermons delivered in peripheral settings, away from theCourtandLondon. This shift poses challenges in terms of reconstructing the physical, political, and religious contexts of preaching and — at an even more basic level — of the availability of sources. This article examines preaching in a number of contexts, and highlights new approaches to the study of the sermon, which address these challenges.

This article emerged out of a larger project on intoxicants and intoxication in early modern England. In the course of researching the subject of drinking it became apparent that, while historians have done much to recover the social structures and social relationships of early modern England, the subject of sociability remains relatively ignored. The article addresses this neglect by developing a conceptual framework in which to place and analyse moments of social interaction like drinking, and by identifying a body of evidence that enables a degree of ethnographic analysis of such interactions. The framework is suggested by the early modern concept of company -- a term used by contemporaries to describe sociability that ranged from corporate institutions (as frequented by guildsmen, theatrical players or soldiers) to ritualized encounters (such as drinking sessions and 'making merry') to transient instances of conversation. The evidence consists of the depositional records of the church courts -- witness statements that are often rich in social observation, and which are especially useful for unpacking the meanings and politics of company. The article provides an overview of the concept of company; suggests some of the issues that a history of company raises; and concludes by considering its defining (and most elusive) dynamic: the relationship between agency and structure.

The analysis centers on the notion of category in synthetic and analytic verbal forms and on the status of the feature that determines the forms of the Latin perfect. In this part of the Latin verbal system, active forms are synthetic (\"verbs\") but passive forms are analytic (i.e., participle and finite auxiliary). I show that the two perfects occur in essentially the same structure and are distinguished by a difference in movement to T; moreover, the difference in forms can be derived without reference to category labels like \"Verb\" or \"Adjective\" on the Root. In addition, the difference in perfects is determined by a feature with clear syntactic consequences, which must be associated arbitrarily with certain Roots, the deponent verbs. I discuss the implications of these points in the context of Distributed Morphology, the theory in which the analysis is framed.

During the late eighteenth century the commanders on Spain's northern frontier town of Nacogdoches conducted two trials against citizens who sang songs that offended them and challenged their authority. One group sang in French and the other in Spanish, and taken together the two trials offer a unique opportunity to observe and reconstruct the vibrant and original musical culture that developed in this contact zone. By placing the songs in a local, regional, and Atlantic context, this essay shows that the creole ranchers, farmers, and traders of east Texas and west Louisiana invented new songs to retain control of their communities. This essay also suggests that the singers and musicians shared ideas with each other while participating in the creative developments that flourished during the Age of Revolution. Both French and Spanish creoles incorporated subversive subjects into their music, though in the end their ribald and incendiary songs did not lead either group to overthrow the Spanish government. Nonetheless, because the musical compositions posed a threat to Bourbon authorities and foreshadowed future uprisings, an analysis of these cases can help us reimagine revolutionary Texas from a fresh perspective that is at once more Tejano and more transregional.

In 1847, a raiding party of Comanches captured a boy named Macario Leal on the outskirts of Laredo TX. Leal lived with the Comanches until the spring of 1854, when he ran away from them in the course of another raid, turning himself in at the Hacienda del Gallo, in the Mexican state of Durango. In the last few years, a number of scholars have highlighted the importance of captivity as a fundamental practice in interethnic relations throughout the southwestern borderlands. In the particular case of the Comanches, several authors have emphasized the important roles that captives played in their political economy, in their relations with other groups, and in Comanche ethnogenesis (the process through which Comanches came into being as a distinct people). Relatively little is known, however, about what life in captivity was like. Leal's testimony complements the stories of other Comanche captives published in English, largely because it differs from them in two essential aspects: the identity of the captive, a Tejano, and the nature of the document, a formal deposition taken in Mexico. Here, Rivaya-Martinez discusses Leal's disposition that sheds light on pre-reservation Comanche culture, and opens a unique window into Comanche captivity.

Although there has been plenty of work on enclosure and the riots against it, the 'political culture' of common lands remains obscure, despite considerable interest amongst social historians in 'everyday politics' and 'weapons of the weak'. This article attempts to recover something of that culture, asking what political meaning was ascribed to certain actions, events and landscape features, and what tactics commoners used to further their micro-political ends. Using a systematic study of interrogatories and depositions in the Court of Exchequer, it finds a complex array of political weaponry deployed in commoning disputes, from gossip, threats and animal-maiming to interpersonal violence. In addition, it shows that the need to establish precedent, or 'long-usage', meant that certain physical acts and features were imbued with political meaning: acts of use, perambulations, old ridge-and-furrow, speech, even dying whispers, could all mean something in the politics of the commons. Moreover, commoners could be subject to moral scrutiny as neighbours, with antisocial behaviour liable to be used against them in disputes. All in all, it is argued that we are only just beginning to recover the politics of the English commons, and that there was much more to them than enclosure rioting.