ABSTRACT
The fact that the texts of a family may be part of its agency and in particular of the political imagination of its women is increasingly recognized by scholars of medieval history and literature. A mid fourteenth-century chronicle made at the abbey of Wigmore for its lay patrons, the Mortimers, acknowledges female roles in the memory and history of a family through its account of what a bad mother to history would do. Women's roles in the construction and the metaphors of women as mothers, good or bad, to history, need not be seen as only figurative. According to John Osborne, clerk of Joan de Mohun, Constable of Dunster Castle, and the author of a Mohun register had given an account of Mohun events and possessions in his Red Book for the utility and profit of the lords of Dunster and most of all to the praise and glory of his most noble lady, Lady Joan de Mohun.
