G. W. Bernard seeks to introduce a more critical approach to the study of the late medieval church in this post–Eamon Duffy era. The overall organization of the volume is appropriate to the task. Yet the author's aim to measure “Vitality and vulnerability before the break with Rome” prioritizes the end of the subject under analysis. Bernard's reliance upon sources from the 1520s and 1530s provides much criticism, but these sources were hardly produced by the medieval church. The end result is a difficult read that has some merit in its overall approach but many flaws in execution.

This reviewer encountered an array of perplexing assertions, assumptions, and conclusions. In chapter 2, “The Monarchial Church,” Bernard writes, “The church in England was . . . a monarchial church, a church over which monarchs had, in practice, very considerable authority” (47). One cannot really argue with that point, except that it was also a papal church. Henry VIII realized it, especially between around 1527 and 1533, and so did many others, including the Drapers in London, who procured a papal bull from Alexander VI as a part of settling the advowson of St. Michael Cornhill. Because the church will become a more exclusively monarchial church and because struggles over royal actions within the church seem largely nonexistent in the fifteenth century, the chapter writes the papacy out of the story long before the 1530s.

In chapter 3, “Bishops,” the episcopacy was judged as “another area of vulnerability in the late medieval church” (49). One example of a good bishop was John Alcock of Ely (1430–1500), who authored books and received a complimentary judgment from John Bale (the ardent mid-sixteenth-century Protestant bishop). If one wishes to know what the medieval world might have expected of bishops, this is not the essay to read. Bernard notes that between 1500 and 1544 only three out of forty-four bishops left sermons (64). (Were any medieval sermons lost in the Protestant era?) The episcopals' need to deal with problems or abuses immediately becomes a question about their failure to create a program of reform (65). The bishops, like the church, appear to be held up to a standard that simply proves them deficient.

The author tends to make sweeping statements. The chapter on the clergy begins, “Whenever bishops and critics spoke of reforming the church, they usually intended to begin with the reform of the priests” (68). This sentence has an endnote that cites a publication from 1988: N. Lemaitre, Le Rouergue flamboyant. Isn't there more recent literature concerning this “fact”? The next sentence reads, “For the condition of the clergy was widely seen as an area of vulnerability in the late medieval church” (68). There is no citation here or for the remainder of the paragraph. One of the topics covered in the chapter is, of course, priestly celibacy. There are “a handful” of examples of priestly failures, as Bernard acknowledges. What if medieval people thought with some nuance and complexity about their clergy and their clerical failings? Bernard does not address this question.

Bernard offers his best insight into what is meant by the key terms vitality and vulnerability at the end of the chapter on “Lay Activity.” Pilgrimage demonstrated vitality because it was popular and widespread, but was it open to vulnerability because it could be attacked critically, skeptically, and politically? We learn that Thomas Bilney, “one of the first Englishmen to have been influenced by Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone, should, as early as 1527–8, have preached sermons at the shrines at Ipswich and Willesden, denouncing pilgrimage and urging that men should address their prayers instead directly to God” (148). How is 1527–28 “early” if one is studying the medieval church? If one is really studying the demise of the medieval church and the birth of the Church of England, then it makes more sense.

The anachronistic approach permeates. “The difficulty for the church was that pilgrimage was so large-scale and so varied an activity, much of it inherited from an obscure past, involving monasteries that were often exempt from episcopal supervision, or informal shrines in remote places, and relics whose authority was based on miracle that controlling, or even monitoring, it was impossible” (143). Does this not indicate that within the milieu of the medieval church, pilgrimages flourished? Greater control of ecclesiastical endeavors comes, of course, with the national church in the early modern period, but why judge earlier practices on later standards and patterns?

Sources and evidence can be offered without much reflection. For example, in the chapter on “Lay Knowledge,” Bernard cites a 1535 royal commissioner as evidence of the onerous requirements of the medieval church: in Doncaster, a parish of over 2,000 people, “the said incumbent and other vij [7] priests . . . can scant hear the confessions of the said parochains [parishioners] from the beginning of Lent unto Palm Sunday, and then minister the blessed sacrament all the said week, and other requisite business to be done in the said church” (93). However, 2,000 divided by 8 priests gives 250 parishioners per priest for confessions. Carried out over thirty-five days (forty days of Lent minus Sundays), that would be approximately seven confessions a day on average. This might not have been an ideal situation, but was it really that dire?

It was bothersome to be delivered certain pronouncements without any real explanation or justification. For example, “[W]e must be alert to the dangers of viewing medieval nunneries through modern feminist lenses” (167–68). The author also claims that measuring the quiet devotion of the people in the early Tudor period is very difficult, but he ignores numerous studies of parish records.

I think Bernard's work, in general, has much to offer students of the long Tudor century. This particular study may point the direction of future scholarship, but sadly, it is problematic.