Reading comp PrepTest 107 · Section 2 · Question 22

Passage

Questions 22-27  .        Until about 1970, anyone who wanted to write a  . comprehensive history of medieval English law Remaining source text redacted.
Passage walkthrough
Passage Summary

Topic: Legal


Paragraph 1

  • Paragraph note
    • There is a lack of scholarship based on court records to show how medieval English law affected women.
  • Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
    • Court records are vital to ascertaining how law actually affected women in medieval period (second sentence)
      • Examples of what could be ascertained by study of court records:
        • show how often women evaded statutory limitations (fourth sentence)
        • Show how often special statutory privileges were enjoyed (fourth sentence)
        • show how general law not directed specifically at women affected them compared to men (fifth sentence)
      • Only quantitative studies of large numbers of cases would allow any steps towards ascertaining these facts (sixth sentence)
    • Treatises, commentaries, statutes - used by scholars of 19th and early 20th century to ascertain how law was thought or intended to affect women (second-third sentences)
    • Author’s attitude: “dearth” (first sentence); “serious deficiency” (second sentence); “vital importance” (second sentence); “of little help” (fourth sentence); “only quantitative studies” (sixth sentence)

Paragraph 2

  • Paragraph note
    • Scholars have not explored court records not only because it would be cumbersome to do so, but principally because there has been little scholarly interest in women’s legal history generally.
  • Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
    • Studying court records from Medieval period is cumbersome: language antiquated, never been published, many long pages of records (second-third sentences)
    • Real reason these studies have not been undertaken is that few academics have been interested in women’s legal history (fourth sentence)
    • Most scholars active in this field have begun with an interest in another area and come upon women’s legal history incidentally, not as their primary concern (fifth sentence)
    • Knowledge of English medieval law as it affected women is fragmentary but slowly growing (seventh sentence)
    • Author’s attitude: “easily imagine” (first sentence); “daunting” (second sentence); “difficulty” (fourth sentence); “the fact is” (fourth sentence); “very few legal historians” (sixth sentence); “fragmentary at best” (seventh sentence); “slowly improving” (seventh sentence)

Main Point: The dearth of scholarship based on actual court records regarding how medieval English law affected women is due to a lack of academic interest in women’s legal history.

Key Lines?

Paragraph 1, Sentence 1(P1 S1) - Statement of phenomenon

P1 S2 - Importance of phenomenon

P2 S2-3 - Superficial explanation

P2 S3 - Author’s explanation

Meta-Structure?

Phenomenon/Explanation: This passage uses a Phenomenon/Explanation Meta-Structure. The phenomenon to be explained is the distinct lack of scholarship on how medieval English law actually affected women. Scholarly work on this topic in the 19th-early 20th centuries has been based on commentaries and treatises and other sources other than court records, which makes this scholarly work a poor gauge of how the law affected women in practice. The superficial explanation of this lack of study is the difficulty of going through the old, voluminous, and challenging source material, but the author argues that this is not the real explanation for why there is a dearth of scholarship. The real reason, the author argues, is a lack of scholarly interest in women’s legal history, including in the medieval period. Legal historians are simply not interested in approaching the subject in the way the author has framed it, so scholarship on how medieval English laws affected women is scarce but growing.

Last Thoughts?

This is a legal passage with a distinctly academic bent, however, the points the author makes about why it is important to look at actual court records instead of commentaries or treatises when studying how medieval English law affected women are interesting ones. The subject may be esoteric, but some of the author’s arguments are based on common sense, and are actually quite accessible.

Question prompt

It can be inferred Remaining source text redacted.
Why the credited answer is right

Credited answer: D

The notes below walk through why it fits the stem and how to eliminate the rest.

Question Type

Legal

Strategy Overview

Consult your notes or passage to recall the author’s attitude about the topic in question, and find the answer that best reflects your understanding of the author’s opinion on that topic.

Answer Anticipation

This question asks us to find the answer choice about sources consulted by nineteenth-century historians of medieval law that the author would most likely agree with. We can review our notes and what we highlighted/underlined to determine where the discussion of this topic takes place. Once we locate the relevant parts of the passage, we can review those to anticipate what the correct answer might say.Looking at our notes, we'll notice the author mentions sources consulted by nineteenth-century historians of medieval law in P1 S2-5. The sources in question are treatises, commentaries, and statutes (P1 S3), and the author says that they show how the law was intended to affect women or thought to affect women (P1 S2), but that it did not show how the law actually affected them in terms of allowing them to enjoy special statutory privileges, evade statutory limitations (P1 S4), or how it affected them compared to men (P1 S5).We should also consider the author's main point when assessing each answer choice. After all, the author wrote the passage to prove the main point — it's the view the author holds with the most conviction, in all likelihood. The correct answer will need to be consistent with the main point. In fact, we may be able to eliminate one or more answer choices because they conflict with the main point.Let’s look for those ideas in the answer choices.

Answer choices

  1. A
    They are adequate to Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice A is not credited

    (A) Is this answer choice consistent with the author’s view about sources consulted by 19th-century legal historians and with the main point of the passage?

    No. In fact, the author points out how these sources are NOT adequate to the needs of a modern legal historian wishing to investigate medieval law because they present merely theoretical or normative views of how medieval laws affected women rather than showing how the law affected women in practice (P1 S4-5). The way a law is intended to affect a group of people can be very different from the way in which it actually affects them when it is put into operation in the courts, and it is that practical impact of medieval law on women that the author is trying to emphasize. A legal historian determined to do a good job of assessing how medieval English law affected women would look at court records (P1 S2), the author argues.

  2. B
    They are to be Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice B is not credited

    (B) Is this answer choice consistent with the author’s view about sources consulted by 19th-century legal historians and with the main point of the passage?

    No. The author points out that, because they were used by 19th-century historians in preference to medieval legal sources, they were effectively preferred to those medieval court records that the author describes in P2 S2-3, but that this is a problem because the treatises, commentaries, and statutes don’t show how law actually affected women in a practical sense during the medieval period (P1 S4-5).

    Again, the author argues that a legal scholar who wants to get to the heart of how the law actually affected women will look at court records instead of the theoretical documents that the 19th-century scholars relied on (P1 S2, P1 S4-5).

  3. C
    They lack fundamental relevance Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice C is not credited

    (C) Is this answer choice consistent with the author’s view about sources consulted by 19th-century legal historians and with the main point of the passage?

    No. This answer choice is full of language that sounds good but has no basis in the passage. The author doesn’t say that the treatises, commentaries, and statutes have no relevance to the history of modern legal institutions, but that they are not to be relied on to give the full picture of how English law affected women during the medieval period (P1 S2-5).

  4. D
    They provide relatively little Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice D matches the stem

    (D) Is this answer choice consistent with the author’s view about sources consulted by 19th-century legal historians and with the main point of the passage?

    Yes. Because the author argues that it is more important for the scholar to know how the law actually affected women, i.e. whether they were able to enjoy the special statutory privileges they were given on paper (P1 S4) or whether they were treated equally to men in courtrooms (P1 S5) than to know how the law was intended to affect women (P1 S2), the author would say that the sources relied on by 19th-century scholars provide little information relevant to what legal scholars should be looking at.

  5. E
    They are valuable primarily Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice E is not credited

    (E) Is this answer choice consistent with the author’s view about sources consulted by 19th-century legal historians and with the main point of the passage?

    No. The sources 19th century scholars relied on can provide answers to some questions (P1 S2), but the author would say that these questions are not ones that have “most interested writers of women’s legal history.” The author actually doesn’t specify which questions have most interested these scholars, merely that there have been very few such scholars willing to undertake a study of medieval court records to ascertain how medieval English law actually affected women (P2 S4).

    So this answer choice is rather ambiguous and it isn’t possible to say the author would agree with it.

What this tests

Question analytics

Based on historical answer selection rates for this question.

Answer choice distribution

  1. A 8%
  2. B 4%
  3. C 3%
  4. D Credited 81%
  5. E 3%

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