Steven Bednarski

Despite the title, A Poisoned Past: The Life and Times of Margarida de Portu, a Fourteenth-Century Accused Poisoner is low on melodrama, but very satisfying as an introduction to the study of microhistory. Steven Bednarski uses surviving records from a town in late medieval southern France to recreate to recreate the criminal trial of one Margardia de Portu, a sixteen-year-old who was accused of the murder of her husband. One of the pleasures of Bednarski's approach is his methodological transparency—he is open to the reader about the problems of source survival, the fact that the Latin is sometimes frustrating and opaque (when was the last time you saw a medievalist admit to wrestling with the language of the sources?), the painstaking and time-consuming demands of archival research, the fact that pre-existing interests shape how a historian frames their sources (a legal historian will approach this trial differently than would a historian of gender, or medicine, etc). I'll definitely be using this book in future courses.… (meer)