Ann Wroe

a three hundred plus page book on a subject on which there is almost no historical record. The majority of the book describes Pilate based on fictional accounts from the middle ages such as "The Golden Legend" or "The Corpus Christi Play of the Middle Ages". I found it difficult to know what was historical and what was fictional. I found it helpful when her source was Josephus or Philo of Alexandria but there wasn't much. I learned about the role of a prefect and the Roman Emperor. The book has an excellent bibliography organized on primary sources, or on periods of time.… (more)

This is the kind of three-dimensional micro-history that can be produced only by an author who is deeply immersed in the primary sources—in the case of A Fool and His Money, it's Ann Wroe's knowledge of the fourteenth-century archives of the southern French town of Rodez that brings this corner of the medieval world to life.

I really appreciated how much detail Wroe was able to wrest from an often-fragmentary source base, and the sympathetic eye with which she studied her cast of quarrelsome characters. (The thread running through the book is a court case involving a pot of gold, but this is not the kind of true crime narrative you can construct with more modern sources—this is more a portrait of a community and way of life using a possible theft as a hook.) So too did I appreciate her thumbnail sketch account of what it was like to work at the archives in Rodez in the early 70s—while almost 40 years and about 500 kilometres separated my postgraduate research experience from Wroe's, there were some hilarious points of commonality.

This is definitely the kind of book that would have benefited from a map, however—I'm not a visual thinker and haven't been to Rodez, so I found it very difficult to picture how the City and the Bourg related to one another spatially.… (more)