Following up on her Clerical marriage and the English Reformation (2000), Helen Parish has turned her attention to its counterpart, clerical celibacy. This is an ambitious work whose chronological scope turns out to be considerably broader than its title might lead one to think. Its first two chapters outline the history of the issue of celibacy in Christian thought prior to the eleventh-century church reform movement, while its final chapter and conclusion provide an overview of clerical celibacy in post-Tridentine Catholicism.

The book is structured chronologically. Following a brief introduction, the first chapter surveys treatments of the ideal of clerical celibacy by patristic writers, councils and popes, roughly up to the mid-sixth century. The following chapter treats the emergence of diverging views about clerical marriage in the eastern and western Churches up to the mid-eleventh century. Next the author takes up the critical changes in the canon law concerning clerical marriage and celibacy wrought by the so-called Gregorian reformers, as well as the numerous difficulties that church authorities encountered in their attempts to enforce the new rule of mandatory celibacy for clerics in major orders. Chapter iv surveys the continuing debates about clerical celibacy in the late medieval Church, while chapter v discusses the rejection of the clerical celibacy requirement by the sixteenth-century reformers and chapter vi deals with celibacy issues in post-Reformation Catholicism up to the early twentieth century. The concluding chapter sums up earlier findings and adds a brief account of late twentieth-century disputes about celibacy requirement up to 2006.

Parish's account of this history is a welcome addition to the literature on this perennially contentious issue. While she takes care to avoid polemics herself, she presents clear and insightful descriptions of the battles that have been waged over the matter. Her command of the substantial scholarship on the subject is evidenced not only by her footnotes and the forty-one-page bibliography that follows her text, but also by her judicious appraisals of earlier treatments of the subject.

That said, it is a pity that some avoidable defects tarnish what is fundamentally an admirable piece of scholarship. Parish all too often fails to cite her sources from the best available texts. To mention just a couple of examples, she refers to Peter Lombard's Sententiae in the unreliable edition by Jean Aleaume (fl. 1537–63), as it was reprinted (with additional typographical errors) in Migne's Patrologia Latina, rather than from the far superior edition published by the College of St Bonaventure at Grottaferrata (3rd edn, 1971–81), while she uses the edition of the Ecclesiastical history of Ordericus Vitalis by Auguste Le Prevost (1838–55) instead of the far more reliable one by Marjorie Chibnall (1969–80). Carelessness in proofreading is, alas, abundantly evident as well, perhaps most obviously in the sporadic omission in her footnotes of diacritical marks in the titles of foreign-language publications. Ironically these generally appear correctly in the bibliography.

Despite these blemishes, Parish furnishes us with a useful and informative survey of the checkered history of the way in which the western Church came to make celibacy mandatory for its clergy in higher orders during the past millennium. However one may regard that policy, it is instructive to learn how it was arrived at and how it has managed to survive, despite the numerous problems that it has created for individual clerics and the institutional Church as a whole. For this medieval historians and students of Catholic Christianity are greatly indebted to her.