Social Memory, Reputation and the Politics of Death in the Medieval Irish Lordship , by Joanna MacGugan

This is an intriguing book, focusing on social and cultural practices surrounding death, especially those underlying legal culture in the Irish Lordship in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Innovatively, Joanna MacGugan examines these using several types of legal source and through conceptions of fama (common fame) found in a person’s reputation, honour, rank, social status, creditability and the social and political connections and the public talk ascribed to it. The book is divided into two parts comprising an unequal number of chapters, though in fact both are comparable in terms of word count. The first section concentrates on the coroner’s jurisdictional authority and the role of jurors in constructing responses to his inquest. The second section addresses fama in the records of the justiciar’s court, examining the significance of social networks and the family in the context of the criminal justice system, how ill fame influenced attitudes towards capital punishment, the social dynamics behind pardoning criminals, and how fama could influence proof of ethnicity. The volume is rounded off with an Epilogue, an extended conclusory chapter which considers the implications of the study and looks at future possibilities arising from it. In a time-jump to a century later than the main body of the book, however, the author first focuses on the composition, communication and social context of wills. This is another important source for unheard voices, but juxtaposition of this self-proclaimed ‘detour’ (p. 175) feels rather odd.