Quotation and Self-Fashioning in Margaret Paston's Household Letters

The private correspondence and papers of the Pastons, a fifteenth-century gentry Family of Norfolk, England, have been an invaluable primary source for medieval scholars in piecing together the social, cultural, economic, and domestic details of a gentlewoman's life in the late medieval period. (1) Of particular interest have been the letters of Margaret Paston, whose correspondence represents the largest preserved collection of female-authored letters by a gentlewoman in late medieval England. Despite this abundance of material, few scholars have moved beyond the historical and philological interests of these letters to discover what they can teach us about women's rhetorical skill, compositional practices, and participation in applied rhetorics like medieval letter-writing. Recent scholarly work on the Paston women's letters demonstrates, however, that important steps are being taken in this direction: Diane Watt, for example, explores what she terms "household rhetoric" in discussing the Paston letters, and Roger Dalrymple examines the reactive, consolatory, and redressive aspects of the Paston women's letters. Broader in scope, Albrecht Classen's and Malcolm Richardson's respective efforts have worked to provide scholars with a methodology and corpus of medieval women's epistolary writings for further study. Each author's scholarly work not only charts new approaches and directions in studying women's epistolary writings, but also emphasizes the need for and importance of studying the rhetoric of women's household letters to enrich our understanding of women's literary history. While scholars agree that Margaret Paston's letters display a woman of considerable influence and consequence in the Paston family, less attention has been directed to the language of Margaret Paston's letters to determine how her linguistic and rhetorical choices contribute to this impression of her. One distinctive feature of Margaret Paston's household letters is her frequent reference to and recital of external sources (individuals' statements or words) in her reports. Despite the prevalence of this practice throughout her correspondence, its purpose and rhetorical effects have not been fully explored. One obvious effect of Margaret's incorporation of others' reported speech is that it constructs her authorial position as a reporter, chronicler, and, perhaps, even translator of the household and estate-related events, information, and experience she recounts in her household letters. This reporting role has, however, largely characterized Margaret Paston's subject position in these letters as a passive and peripheral one. This characterization is not entirely surprising given that, in discussions of medieval women's literary history, the authorial roles of chronicler and translator have been identified as strategies of submission used by women to attach themselves to male authorities and participate in male literary activities (Barratt 12-16). Margaret's own literary activity falls within this purview, for her routine composition of these household letters is attached to the male authority of her husband, John Paston 1. Margaret's letter-writing is, after all, primarily motivated by her husband's request that she provide him with an ongoing written account of household and estate matters. Consequently, the report mode that characterizes her speech function throughout her letters is one that speaks of her subordinate position as a wife obligated to provide her husband with frequent written reports in governing estate business in iris absence. Taking this social dynamic into consideration, this essay examines the practice of quotation to illustrate its presence not only as a function of Margaret's subordinate reporting role and the social constraints upon her but also as an important rhetorical strategy instrumental in her self-fashioning as an administrative authority on household and estate matters and as an influential social agent, acting as mediator and ambassador for the Paston family and its interests. …