Thiery's book on late medieval English parishioners assigns religion its rightful place in the “civilizing process.” He detects the first stirrings of this “process” in ambivalent attitudes toward violence within the highly competitive parish communities of late medieval England. In these tight-knit, hierarchical societies, parishioners' heightened sensitivity to honor and shame sometimes led to lawsuits or physical violence against rivals. Parishioners justified these forms of aggression as honorable, according to contemporary mores, which deemed violence appropriate in certain circumstances. Thiery argues that the Church's alternative definition of honor, gained by introspective piety and charity to fellow parishioners, challenged these mores. Pious parishioners learned that their sinfully aggressive tendencies endangered their own salvation and threatened to bring down God's wrath on the entire parish community. These dangers were very real to late medieval English parishioners, who took their religion seriously, even if their conduct violated the Church's teaching on the need for charity and self-restraint in disputations with their neighbors.
In the first section of his book, Thiery analyzes the synodal decrees, sermons, and handbooks written for clergy and parishioners, which communicated to parishioners the need for charity and fellowship. Parishioners learned that the parish church and its yard were sacred spaces, not to be polluted by violence. Although all liturgical ceremonies were sacred, anger and violence in the Eucharist's presence were especially abhorrent, for the doctrine of transubstantiation emphasized Christ's real presence in the Host. Private meditation and confession, the individual parishioner's basic need to have an honorable reputation within the parish community, and the threat of divine punishment reinforced the Church's teaching.
The second section of Thiery's book examines court cases and letters describing violent incidents that occurred in churches and churchyards or disrupted liturgical rituals. This line of inquiry into descriptive sources specifically addresses issues raised in prescriptive sources, allowing a deeper understanding of Christianity's influence on parishioners' attitudes toward violence. Thiery concludes that violent parishioners remained aware of the Church's teaching, despite their apparent indifference to the sanctity of churches and liturgical rituals. At times, an angry parishioner might seek out a rival in church precisely because he knew his rival would be attending services. A humiliating attack in such a public setting, before his shocked fellow parishioners and God, gained intensity from its sacrilegious nature. In several cases, however, the sight of the Eucharist halted violence in church. In other cases, parishioners invoked the need for charity while resolving conflicts in churches. These negotiated settlements preserved the honor of rival parishioners, as they piously renounced their struggle for dominance over each other.
Occasionally, parishioners seemed to manipulate the Church's teaching against violence to their advantage, raising questions about their internalization of charitable ideals. In one dispute over a distrained horse, Robert Gatell of Ouseburn, Yorkshire, refused to leave the church courtyard to fight his challenger, John Man. Yet Gatell took advantage of a general melee between Man and a number of parishioners to strike Man in the head with his staff as he left the churchyard. While the parishioners who scuffled with Man piously tried to prevent the desecration of their churchyard, Man and Gatell seem more cunning than pious. Perhaps both were trying to avoid allegations of sacrilegious violence in the inevitable court case.
Thiery's analysis of the influence of the Church's teaching on the conduct of parishioners rings true. His book, however, may not attract the attention it deserves, for it assumes the reader's specialist knowledge of primary sources and parish life in general. The non-specialist will have to turn to recent publications by John Bossy, Eamon Duffy, and Katherine French, among others, for necessary background. More difficulties for the reader arise in Thiery's examination of court cases, which focuses narrowly on violent incidents, while ignoring the long-running, simmering nature of these disputes. More background might explain why parishioners brought on themselves the stigma of sacrilege, despite their awareness of the Church's teachings.
Theiry occasionally traces the Church's preaching against violence back to the Peace of God, but that raises a number of unanswered questions about his decision to pinpoint the later Middle Ages as the time when ecclesiastical prohibitions of violence became effective among English parishioners. The sources examined in the first section of his book may indicate that parishioners' literacy and the development of Church doctrines stimulated a tendency to define violence as sacrilegious in certain circumstances. Thiery's emphasis on court cases in his book's second section implies that ecclesiastical and royal institutions had developed sufficient power to reinforce the Church's teachings. A study that raises such interesting questions will certainly stimulate further research on this very important topic. Moreover, Thiery's analysis of the shared concerns of prescriptive and descriptive sources offers an interesting methodology for tracing the subtle influence of religious faith upon behavior. His book offers significant insights into the way the Christianization of medieval society contributed to the “civilizing process.”
