Alongside his long career based in Emmanuel College, a private university in Boston and the first ever US university for women, Don(ald) Logan was a highly productive scholar, publishing his first book (Excommunication and the secular arm in medieval England) in 1968 and his sixth and final book (The register of Simon Sudbury, archbishop of Canterbury, 1375–1381) in 2020 – that is across the 52 years that separated his thirty-eighth from his ninetieth year. If that makes him seem a late starter, then his seven years in formation for priesthood and then degrees at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto explain the slow build up. In total, the bibliography at the back of this memorial volume lists six books and more than twenty deeply researched essays and articles. With the exception of his second book, The Vikings in History (good enough to be translated into six Continental European languages), all his work concerned the records of canon law and what they can teach us about English religious and devotional life from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. And those are, loosely it must be said, the themes of this sumptuous memorial volume. Donald lived long enough to be told all about the volume but not to handle it. It contains twenty-two essays, a majority by most of the prominent scholars of legal and ecclesiastical history who arrived on the scene during Donald’s maturity, fifteen of them now Emeriti. All those still en poste are senior. There is also a significant 80-page introduction by a young independent scholar who curated the whole volume.

The essays are grouped into four sections: ‘Aspects of Secular and Ecclesiastical Legal Culture’ (nine essays); ‘Aspects of Mendicant and Monastic Culture’ (seven essays); ‘Aspects of Clerical Culture’ (four essays); and ‘English Laymen and the Papacy’ (two essays, the second of which, on the vexed history of the ‘lost’ text of the ‘Irish’ Remonstrance of 1317, is anything but English). The essays cover the full range of Donald’s chronological interests, from Anne Duggan’s lively account of how the Gilbertines at some risk to themselves enabled Archbishop Becket’s flight from Northampton in 1164 to essays on how novices were still flocking into monasteries as the last ones were being (unthinkably) suppressed, and a detailed re-examination of Edmund Bonner’s trial and deposition in 1549. A few essays cover more than one century (‘Continuities and seasonality in the York consistory courts, 1300–1500’; ‘The abbots of the Cistercian house of Meaux, 1151–1399’), and a larger cluster focus on the fourteenth century (with important new evidence on the massive impact of the Black Death on religious houses and their startling resilience). Most of the essays in the first section are narrowly (at times entertainingly and always instructionally) concerned with due process in ecclesiastical and civil law courts, with texts more than with people. The second section is primarily concerned with the increasing visibility of monks and friars, with Michael Robson’s account of the astonishing expansion of Franciscan houses in one diocese (Ely) standing out. The third section brings individuals into focus, whether as testators in the register of Archbishop Simon of Sudbury (1375–81) or the sad story of a Rutland rector with advanced leprosy and how compassionately he was treated by his bishop. The fourth section (presents Seymour Phillips’s tantalising account of why the original of the 1317 ‘Irish’ Remonstrance might yet be found, and a compelling account and analysis by Caroline Barron of London laymen’s resort to Rome across the fifteenth century. Corporate bodies sought confirmation of urban privileges or the removal of burdensome charges, but more importantly individuals sought licences to appoint their own confessors and to avoid their parish priests, the right to possess portable altars, to hear mass before daybreak and above all to be granted a plenary indulgence for confession at time of death. This chapter has an especially strong pay-off line.

So this is a very mixed bag united by demonstrating the sort of curiosity and archival pertinacity that characterised Donald Logan’s work. Few will want to read all the essays; all will want to read some or most. The book is an exemplary production with one exception: it has a wretchedly inadequate index. Every essay has a very full and helpful bibliography; there is a full list of Donald Logan’s publications, including later editions and translations; there is a delightful note by Diana Greenway on Donald ‘assiduously accumulating material – and friends’ during his annual visits to London. And there is the Travis Baker’s eighty-page introduction. Most of this is an intelligent commentary and gloss on the twenty-two researched essays and is marked by some nice turns of phrase. The opening is less effective. More than 90 percent of the words in the first thirteen pages are in footnotes and the first twenty pages are an unconvincing attempt to reject the term ‘pre-Reformation’ (though who uses that term for the period before 1450?) and ‘late medieval’ (because too many people do not know what it means – though everyone likely to encounter this book at that price will know) in favour of ‘later Catholic England’. This is surely a term even less likely to be understood and to create more confusions than it dispels. The problem is that the polemic in favour of ‘later Catholic’ creeps back throughout the introduction and especially in the closing pages. And, to be honest, the other part of the title ‘Christian culture and society’ is also problematic, as the earlier part of this review would suggest. This is ‘culture’ as it was understood before the ‘cultural turn’. This book would be more appropriately titled ‘The regulation of religious practice in late(r) medieval England’. That title tells you what it is really about: a book that is very good indeed as a potpourri of essays about just that subject, old-fashioned but none the worse for that.