Nigel Saul's latest book is a study of the English parish church in the longue durée, with special reference to gentry involvement. Like his English church monuments in the Middle Ages (Oxford 2011), it attempts a broad synthesis of a major, heavily investigated field, rather than a regional study of gentry culture of the sort that its author has also produced to such good effect. It is thus an inherently ambitious book, of broader relevance to medievalists and ipso facto more likely to generate influence and disagreement. Whatever one thinks about it, one has to admire Saul's industry, for he manages to work through a great deal of material on the way to producing monographs any one of which would be the main product of many scholarly careers.

Readers who know Saul's work will immediately recognise the approach, tone and leanings of Lordship and faith. For example, the choice to focus on the gentry, which conditions almost everything about the book, is perfectly true to form. The other dominant theme, the material and functional parish church, is also a native haunt of the author. By bringing the two together, Saul responds, perhaps inadvertently, to a particular ‘moment’ in scholarship about the late Middle Ages. Gentry and parish church are familiar bedfellows, of course, and research on both is always going on to a greater or lesser extent. Until very recently, it was a lesser extent in both cases. This may sound peculiar to those who have laboured abidingly in these vineyards, but a disinterested glance around, and backwards, will show that studies of the English parish church in particular have fallen into (relative) abeyance compared with the quantity and quality of scholarship produced in the 1980s and 1990s. Now the parish church is re-emerging, from behind the religious house and other things, as a mainstream focus of historians, with Lordship and faith in the van. The gentry has also been overshadowed lately by the study of women, merchants and various sorts of corporation. While this hardly amounts to an eclipse, there is a sense in which all that is encapsulated by a fussy coat of arms – privilege, condescension, social climbing, masculinity – is out of step with contemporary academic politics and thus considered dubious. Saul, however, puts it centre stage, almost as though stressing a point of principle.

The parish and gentry focus is inherently brave in the context of a broadly based inquiry because it requires working definitions that will not please everyone. In fact, the parish church has not struck anyone much as a particularly controversial or even necessary thing to define given the determining roles of function and status that distinguish it from the chapel on one hand and the collegiate or monastic church on the other. Like previous writers on the subject, Saul is conscious of the need to define how and when the parish and its church emerged from the pre-Domesday landscape (chapters i and ii). However, for the period after 1200 he hardly questions the orthodoxy of crowding together under one heading what is actually an extraordinarily heterogeneous phenomenon. To be fair, taking this issue on would involve writing a different sort of book; and Saul does account for the variety to some degree when discussing subjects like church building (chapter x). The variety also comes out implicitly in another way. Because Saul's study is largely document-led, it does not suffer from the false standardisation common in architectural history, whereby the crème-de-la-crème of buildings is represented as the norm. Rather, great and small churches alike are used here to make the case. Moreover, gentry relations to chapels, colleges and religious houses are separately addressed (chapters iv, v, xii). A more pressing issue for most readers will be definition of ‘the gentry’. Saul takes this on, of course (pp. 8, 9–10, 299–300), as he must given the book's overarching aim to review prevailing opinion about gentry involvement with the parish church and attempt a redefinition of it (p. 16). Saul argues that although the gentry is notionally a late medieval category, it can in fact be pushed back before the late thirteenth century (a commonly assumed terminus post for it), even to the Conquest. Thus, the gentry attended in church ‘right across the Middle Ages’ (p. 134). This pushing back is part of the redefinition. But when it comes to the late Middle Ages, on which most of the text dwells, the need to control the material causes exclusions tricky to justify historically. Merchants who purchased lands (and helped to build parish churches) would be an example. The exclusions are reflected in the bibliography: thus, Eamon's Duffy's Voices of Morebath – by any standard a major book on the late medieval English parish – is absent, presumably because its heroes are a priest and his rural flock rather than some landowning, economically alpha male.

Broadly speaking, the coverage in this book is episodic rather than responsive to a dominant and transcendent idea. The main chapters deal with the mechanics of gentry activity in relation to parochial buildings, institutions and ceremonies. Patronage, self-fashioning, obligation and commemoration are dominant themes. Saul is big, and strong, on the forms and functions of tombs and chantries (chapters vii, viii). As usual in his work, the conclusions are common-sense ones, which is refreshing to the positivist (including this reviewer). The conventional, routine, orthodox nature of gentry religion is stressed over individualism and private devotional enthusiasms. In downplaying the notion of ‘private’ religion, Saul is at one with Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the altars, a book whose influence on Saul's domain has been enormous. However, in another way, his isolation and championing of the gentry constitute a challenge to Duffy's view of corporate parochial hubbub in which gentry aims were fused with those of what Saul calls ‘humble parishioners’ (p. 330). It is hard to think this unintended.