Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe

Fama remains one of the richest, most unified, and polished collections of essays on medieval culture and society that I have read in quite some time.

In a model of interdisciplinary exchange, the editors, noted literary and legal history scholars Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, offer a well-conceived volume replete with original scholarship by some of the best scholars in their fields.... Fama, according to the editors, intersected with terms like honor, shame, status, and witnessing, and glossed the essential nexus of performance, talk, reputation, and speech regulation. Fama thus defied classification, crossing the boundaries of literary, legal, religious, and secular worlds, like many of the articles in this volume.... The contributors are in concert with one another, weaving a textual conversation about talk in a collection that is sure to inspire future dialogue and debate about the importance of talk in medieval Europe for years to come.

It seems quite appropriate that Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe should be co-edited by a historian and a literary specialist: the book is truly interdisciplinary, cutting across issues of popular culture, law, literature, and gender. It offers an intriguing introduction to a topic whose value is unmistakable and is thus an original contribution to our knowledge of the Middle Ages.

This book is polished and coherent-a pleasure and a learning experience to read.

This volume... is exemplary.... The subject is both large and new.... This book deserves considerable bona fama of its own. Nor should it be of interest only to medievalists and early modernists. Modernists, too, will find much of interest, clearly accessible. Here U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence 609 jostles modern French juges d'instruction, John Austin joins Pierre Bourdieau, and cucking-stools migrate from fifteenth-century England to colonial North America.