The innumerable vernacular and Latin works seeking to inculcate the message of the “pastoral revolution” stimulated by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 form a textual tradition that endured from the thirteenth into the sixteenth century; generically unified as pastoralia, they provide a rich seam for scholarly analysis. Generated across Catholic Europe, these texts are fundamental for understanding the contexts and messages of the late medieval program of pastoral care, and for excavating some appreciation of the laity's response. The extensive Middle English contribution to the tradition is well known and much studied, but it constitutes only part of the full “English” tradition. Particularly in the thirteenth century, but with twelfth-century antecedents, material also circulated in French. Much of it was subsequently translated into Middle English and so contributed to that strand of the tradition; but the French works, as an element in the tradition in their own right (and, it follows, as one foundation for the Middle English proliferation) have attracted only limited attention.

Claire Waters addresses that lacuna in Translating Clergie: Status, Education, and Salvation in Thirteenth-Century Vernacular Texts, a well-written and valuable assessment that merits a much wider readership than its title perhaps invites. Her focus is on the potentially problematic relationship between the clerical instructors and their lay readers or hearers, recipients whom she prefers to think of as discipuli, “students,” but perhaps seen by their teachers more as pupils (5). The linguistic and chronological foci do create a minor analytical challenge, which may mean that the analysis works better as a contribution to study of the pastoral tradition as a European phenomenon than as an assessment of a specifically English development; but to impose a rigid separation here would go too far. The uncertainty arises from the international—or transnational—character of contemporary French. King John lost Normandy, but that forced Brexit did not end England's cultural ties with the continent, or curtail the role of French as the dominant textual vernacular. Waters works with texts which might simplistically be called “Anglo-Norman,” both in language and cultural milieu. Many were produced within England, others crossed there from France. Some may not have made it to England, yet can be legitimately integrated into the linguistically shaped tradition. Precisionist exclusion of “un-English” French texts would be neither feasible nor justified: one of the book's strengths is Waters's contribution to wider understanding of the transmission of the pastoral message and fulfilment of the program as goals that transcended both political and linguistic boundaries.

Like its underlying texts, the volume itself translates clergie. The original translation—both geographical, as the texts themselves moved around, and linguistic, as the latinate clerical knowledge encapsulated as clergie was recast into vernacular instructional works in prose and verse—now becomes an academic process of transmitting textual analyses to readers. Waters rises impressively to her task. At a practical level, potential linguistic barriers are eroded by incorporating appropriate English translations of her quoted extracts into the commentary (alongside the original Latin or French). Argumentatively, she provides a valuable guide through the material; seeing the texts’ pastoral imperative as not merely a desire or requirement to teach laypeople how they might ultimately attain salvation, but an awareness of both teaching and reception as critical facets of the cure of souls. The process of reception is imaged and imagined in the manuscripts, but its reality is inevitably the missing half of the equation. That is not Waters's fault or failure; the texts reflect the early stages of a long-term process that, for its most ambitious or receptive adepts, would lead to the clericalization of the laity (or laicization of clergie), with all its unintended consequences for the balance of pastoral and spiritual authority between clerics and the likes of Margery Kempe. Engaging in remote interactions with their readers or hearers as partners in a text-based conversation, these thirteenth-century authors sought to guide and instruct in the requirements of post-Lateran IV Catholicism and thereby promote access to salvation. That meant (among other things) confronting the transitional point of death and its potential barriers and hindrances, and providing reassurance that salvation was always possible even for those considered outcasts (chapter 4 is neatly and tellingly titled, “Getting the Riffraff into Heaven: Jongleurs, Whores, Peasants, and Popular Eschatology”).

Like much medieval pastoral literature, many of these texts seem timeless in their message. That matters. Waters writes of the early stages of the pastoral revolution and its potentially momentous attempts to textualize doctrine and theology in the vernacular. Her texts are foundational for the tradition and its techniques. Unsurprisingly, much of her analysis resonates with and illuminates subsequent developments, as the clergie was further translated into Middle English. The outcome is a stimulating and thought-provoking volume, valuable not just for scholars of thirteenth-century religion, but for anyone working on the pastoralia of the pre-Reformation church.