God’s Own Gentlewoman

I have previously posted about the Paston family in Norfolk and some of the books based on the tranche of their letters held in the British Library.  Now a new book has been published by Amberley imprint Icon Books examining the history of Margaret Paston, arguably the matriarch of the family.

“Margaret Mautby was born in the village of Reedham in the first qurater of the fifteenth century.  She was well-off – her parents Margery Berney and John Mautby were from prosperous land-owning families – and she married into the upwardly mobile Paston family. She and her husband, John, had seven surviving children.”  

John, like his father, was a lawyer and spent a great deal of his time in London, and so much of their communication about matters ranging from the price of fish to battles over the ownership of manors, was carried out by letter.  Remarkably, most of these letters were retained and survived, with the originals now in the British Library.  Many books have been produced based on this unique resource, but few are currently in print.  And even the modern ‘translations’ of these letters can be difficult to understand – apart from the language, they rely greatly on context which is not always obvious to the casual reader.

Diane Watt is Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Surrey and has specialised in women’s writing from the period.  She has previously published her own translation of selected Paston letters.  In God’s Own Gentlewoman, she takes us through Margaret’s life, telling the story from a woman’s point of view, explaining the historical context of this period of massive political unrest and uncertainty leading up to the Wars of the Roses.  Although written by an academic, this is readable and accessible to those of us who don’t have a detailed background knowledge of this fascinating period of Norfolk’s history, whilst still being rigorous and thoroughly researched.