Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
Summary
What did the Pastons think of Joan the Meatless? Thomas Netter, who died in 1430, wrote:
I will cite a case from our own time and experience. In the northern part of England, called Norfolk, which is very rich in both temporal and spiritual things, there recently lived a devout Christian girl called in the vulgar tongue Joan the Meatless, because it was proven that she had not tasted food or drink for fifteen years, but only fed with the greatest joy every Sunday on the sacrament of the Lord's body.
Agnes and William Paston no doubt encountered Joan. She is not, however, in the Paston Letters. Why not? Was she not sufficiently sensational? I miss the point. The point is that Joan the Meatless lived (and no doubt died) in unsensational Norfolk, humdrum, homely Norfolk, as unlike, apparently, Huizinga's fifteenth-century universe as Caroline Walker Bynum's twentieth-century world. Yet there Joan was. She makes me think that I might have mistaken the Norfolk of the Pastons, or indeed the Pastons themselves.
When reading the Paston Letters it is easy to slip into the Dickensian view of English history, a view epitomised by Dickens' attitude towards English law: ‘The one great principle of the English Law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.’ Is the English past, like the English present, nothing but business? The Pastons make us think so; Joan the Meatless impels us to think otherwise. It is in an endeavour to think otherwise about the Pastons that I have written the first chapter of the book.
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- The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century , pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996