Interest in England's parishes, the basic unit of public worship, started out as an avenue for understanding the causes and consequences of the Reformation. They have now become a topic in their own right, as medievalists have shown that late-medieval devotion, at the so-called popular level, has a history of its own that should not be understood as leading inevitably to the Reformation. It is within the desire to understand the late-medieval parish in its own terms that Clive Burgess's welcome book The Right Ordering of the Souls fits. Burgess not only seeks to identify change over time in the pre-Reformation church, but to tie the changes and developments of one parish into the larger political and cultural changes of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The sources most commonly used for studying the late-medieval parish are what archivists call churchwardens’ accounts, accounts kept by lay parish officials as they raised and spent money to maintain the nave and its contents in accordance with English canon law. As Burgess's many prior publications have shown, churchwardens’ accounts were not the sum total of records kept by parishes but are often lost. All Saints’ Bristol is unusual in that it not only has churchwardens’ accounts, which start in the 1460s, but some wills, deeds, chantry accounts, which start in the 1450s, and perhaps most unusually the “All Saints’ Church Book.” It was started probably in the 1480s and is essentially a list of parish benefactors covering the mid- and late fifteenth century. The “Church Book” also includes parish ordinances, two inventories, and a list of the churchwardens’ contributions from before the start of the “Church Book.” While these kinds of records must have been common enough at the time, their connection to the doctrine of Purgatory has made them exceedingly rare. Moreover, Bristol, unlike London, did not suffer a major fire, which also cost London many of its medieval records. Together this archive not only provides unusual access to the different activities, interest groups, and devotional concerns of one parish, but it also provides ample evidence of the parish's self-awareness as a corporate entity and social and religious community.

Burgess divides his book into five parts, containing a total of twelve chapters and a conclusion. The first section, a chapter on its own, provides a deep context for the parish as an institution. In a grand sweep, Burgess outlines the development of parishes out of minsters—that is, monasteries with un-cloistered monks, and responsibilities for the cure of souls—and then moves to situate the parish in the major issues of the next three centuries: the Gregorian Reforms, the Fourth Lateran Council, the rise of the friars, heresy and crown responses, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years War. The next five chapters make up the second part. Burgess starts with a discussion of the city of Bristol and the parish of All Saints and its sources. He finishes the section with analysis of the social networks within the parish based on evidence provided by wills and the “Church Book.” Although few extant wills from All Saints’ survive, those that do provide evidence of several networks of well-to-do burgesses who donated important property to the parish. Their donations would provide the financial basis for  expanding liturgy and extensive building renovations. Included in this network are widows, whose legal independence allowed them to carry out their own devotional goals. The section ends with a chapter of a court case, where the stepson of one widow tried to undermine her donation and the parish's legal response to protect it.

This court case is a touchstone for the rest of the book, as it offers ways of examining multiple issues and themes of interest to Burgess. The third section, “Commemorating the Dead,” focuses specifically on the Halleway's Chantry, an endowment that was to pray for the souls of its founders in perpetuity. The overlapping records, however, allow Burgess to show how the chantry, which is largely invisible in the churchwardens’ accounts, helped augment the parish's liturgy and aided in the upkeep of the building. The chantry's own records also show how the vagaries of the fifteenth-century economy created economic difficulties for the parish, and how the parish responded to them. The fourth section analyzes the parish's administration. While churchwardens are the most visible officers, the different kinds of records reveal that in this parish, they were not the leaders but rather concerned with the maintenance of initiatives set in place by others. These others are the clergy, many of whom were long-serving and committed to the parish, and a shadowy parish council. Yet, the parish council did not act alone, and needed the consent of the parishioners. What constituted the body of parishioners—whether it included just householders or also those further down the social spectrum—is less clear. The final section, consisting of two chapters, takes up first the physical building, its renovations, liturgical contents, images, and altars, while the second chapter assess what we know about All Saints’ liturgy.

The Conclusion does not focus on the Reformation, but rather, it reassesses what this parish had become by the sixteenth century. Burgess argues that when parishes separated from minsters in the ninth and tenth centuries, they were “truncated corporations” (413), served by a single priest. By the sixteenth century, many were dynamic institutions with many priests and sub-parochial groups and so had come full circle, resembling the minsters, from which they had developed. At All Saints’ Bristol, the leadership and financial contributions of committed clergy and devoted parishioners of means, combined with an administrative structure that protected and enhanced these contributions. With the fortuitous survival of the parish archive that resulted from these dynamics, Burgess reconstructs in exquisite detail the expanding liturgical program and the social and administrative underpinnings that so concerned the late medieval parishioners.