Planned as a tribute, this volume became a memorial after Donald Logan’s death in 2022. It presents twenty-two studies on four of his interests: royal and ecclesiastical law; the religious orders; clerical culture and pastoral care; and lay attitudes to the papacy. At 651 pages, it is weighty physically and intellectually: the chapters range from short studies of individual documents to lengthy essays distilling extensive research.

After a long introduction incorporating a personal manifesto from Baker on the state of the field, Charles Donahue opens the legal section with a close analysis of land disputes involving the Polstead family in East Anglia from 1170 to 1216. He urges scholars to consider the role of feudal lords (“look to vertical relationships,” 102) and of female heirs and dowagers when analyzing such disputes. Paul Brand develops, with case studies, earlier scholars’ sketchy accounts of the use of quare non admisit and quare incumbravit proceedings to compel ordinaries to submit to the royal courts in advowson suits. In an innovative analysis of York consistory court records, Frederik Pedersen links fluctuations in caseloads to the annual liturgical and agricultural cycle. He shows convincingly that the courts were busiest when agricultural life was quietest, though the suggestion that a sermon on marriage on the second Sunday after Epiphany could lead to court proceedings by the end of January carries less conviction: the timing seems too tight. Richard Helmholz uses lawyers’ records and diocesan archives to show how provincial ecclesiastical lawyers looked to advocates in the Court of Arches and Doctors’ Commons in London for advice and leadership. Robert Swanson develops that theme by examining the formulary of Thomas of Rippeley, advocate, official of the archdeacon of Leicester, and auditor in the Arches in the 1370s and 1380s. Barbara Bombi provides a thorough and penetrating analysis of the litigation between St. Augustine’s Canterbury and Archbishop Mepham in the early fourteenth century, adding insights from canon law and diplomatic and from close attention to the role of the curial proctor Andreas Sapiti. Her revisions to the dates I suggested in an earlier paper are plausible; I am less convinced that Mepham was anything but the author of his own misfortunes. Patrick Zutshi gives an authoritative survey of the background, changing roles, and influence of proctors representing English interests at the Roman curia during the Great Schism, arguing that the royal proctors anticipated the office of ambassador. Daniel Williman and Karen Corsano compare the promulgation of the Liber Sextus of Boniface VIII, which officials drew to Henry VIII’s attention, with the preparation of the unissued Henrician Canons of 1533 rediscovered by Logan. Henry Ansgar Kelly reads closely the trial and deposition under Edward VI of Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, and its later history, identifying a mixture of canonical/civil inquisitorial process and common law which may have influenced common law due process.

Anne Duggan opens the section on religious orders by tracing the role of the Gilbertines and their fenland houses in enabling Thomas Beckett’s escape and cross-channel flight after the Council of Northampton in 1164. Michael Robson surveys the Franciscans’ fourteenth-century presence in the diocese of Ely: the conventual life, numbers, and recruitment of the friars, their preaching and pastoral activity in Cambridge and surrounds, their intellectual life and contribution to the university. Michael Haren finds in pastoral manuals by secular clergy in the first half of the fourteenth century—Pagula, Ayton and the Memoriale presbyterorum—premonitions of the campaign against the friars by Archbishop Fitzralph of Armagh. Jens Röhrkrasten surveys the mendicants’ English land acquisitions and finds that the Black Death, despite reducing friars’ numbers, spurred acquisitions of land and expansion of priories, especially by the Carmelites and Augustinians. Janet Burton documents the Cistercian abbots of Meaux in Holderness from 1151 to 1399: their origins, rise, successes, failures, and posterity. The house surmounted early economic problems but fell into factionalism after the Black Death, with disputed elections and external lawsuits. Joan Greatrex reconstructs the career of the Benedictine doctor of theology William of Worstede, prior of Norwich 1427–1436 and English delegate at the Council of Basle, printing one of his addresses there. James Clark presents statistical evidence that male and female religious recruitment increased in England in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and persisted even between Henry VIII’s restrictions of 1534 and the dissolution.

On clerical culture and pastoral care, Virginia Davis gives a thorough and wide-ranging survey of the activities, experience, and remuneration of chaplains of lay households. Philippa Hoskin surveys the use of seals in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, using forensic analysis to explore the relations between seals and personal identity, the law and practice of sealing, and the pattern of sealing in person or by proxy. Jane Sayers uses the testamentary records in the register of Archbishop Simon Sudbury to profile the material life, family and social allegiances, and piety of the testators. Nicholas Bennett studies the treatment of aged and infirm clergy in Lincoln diocese, noting a move from appointment of coadjutors to retirement with a pension and providing a case study of a leprous rector.

On the laity, Caroline Barron surveys Londoners’ attitudes to and interactions with the papacy in the later Middle Ages and concludes that, notwithstanding interest in indulgences, and licenses such as the choice of confessor, their primary religious allegiance lay with their parishes and local fraternities. Seymour Philipps examines the textual history of the Irish Remonstrance against the English sent to John XXII in 1317 and explains the loss of the original.

This is a rich diet for ecclesiastical, legal, and social historians. All the contributions reach a high standard and maintain Logan’s careful attention to sources, evidence and social context, the need for which could stand as a unifying theme. Many also call into question the stereotype of a moribund late medieval Church—a complex subject which needs the careful, fine-grained study and avoidance of easy generalization displayed here.