Traditionally, English clerics in the tenth and eleventh centuries have been viewed as poorly educated and thus ill equipped to exercise pastoral care, an impression carefully fostered by Benedictine authors from the middle of the tenth century onward, and for a long time happily accepted by scholars. Recently, scholarship has reassessed this view, in part by examining the Benedictine agenda with more care and in part by taking more effort to find out about non-monastic clergy (“secular clergy,” as they became known in the twelfth century) themselves. Simultaneously, research on earlier medieval European clergy more widely has shown how much we can learn about their pastoral activities from the books they owned and used. In Priests and their Books in Late Anglo-Saxon England, Gerald Dyson has put these two approaches together. He has carefully examined evidence for the literacy of the later Anglo-Saxon secular clergy and for the use of books by priests for pastoral care, which was mostly a clerical responsibility, even in England, where Benedictine monks were also involved. In the process, he has also highlighted the important roles played by the communities of secular clergy serving minster churches, as producers, owners, and distributors of books, and also as educators.

Dyson's focus in is essentially on priests rather than the clergy as a whole: while this is perfectly understandable given that only priests could celebrate mass and therefore were the most likely to possess the necessary service books, it might nonetheless have been a good idea to reflect more fully on the extent to which books might have been owned by clerics below the priesthood. Books for the daily office, for example, would have been relevant to all; moreover, several of the most powerful and wealthy clerics were not in priests’ orders. Dyson takes care to explain the ecclesiastical context before discussing the books. After an introduction outlining recent research on clergy, pastoral care, and priests’ books, there follow three chapters providing an overview of the role of the priest and the types of church in which secular clergy operated and investigations of clerical literacy and how books were produced and circulated. These are followed by three chapters looking at books for different aspects of pastoral care: one on homiletic manuscripts; one on manuscripts for mass and the daily office; and one on manuscripts containing penitentials, liturgical texts for occasional offices such as baptism, and computistical information. The chapter on clerical literacy, in addition to surveying evidence for how clergy were educated, gathers together scraps of information on secular clerics as scribes and as authors: cumulatively, these allow the reader to see that books were produced quite widely, and often at secular minsters. This prepares the ground for the following chapter with its discussion of how books were produced, which notes that many manuscripts produced between 900 and 1066 in England cannot be ascribed to one of the well-known scriptoria (usually monastic ones, such as Winchester), but appear to be one-offs. As Dyson comments, they may be lone survivals from minor writing centers: certainly, they show us that book production occurred in a very wide range of places. Priests might also have books supplied for them by bishops or by magnates, or in some cases purchased for them: for the richest clerics, who (as we can see from Domesday) controlled incomes equivalent to those of bishops of poorer sees, book purchase would have been easy. Each of the chapters on the books themselves closes with a set of case studies of individual manuscripts. Some of these are obvious, but nonetheless welcome, choices, such as the Red Book of Darley. But some are less prominent examples, such as the Taunton fragment, part of a bilingual version of the Homiliary of Angers, which would clearly have been useful for pastoral purposes, and the Warsaw Lectionary (Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa, I. 3311), which although it presents readings in the canonical not the liturgical order would have been useful for pastoral care (the contents of the manuscript are listed in an appendix at the end of the book). Dyson concludes with some useful contrasts with equivalent Carolingian and post-Carolingian priests’ books (English ones did not normally include legal texts, as mainland European ones often did), and also with a plea for further research on manuscript fragments, since these are likely to contain more material of relevance.

Overall, this is a carefully argued and learned account of how the clergy in pre-Conquest England were able to obtain liturgical books and put them to use in pastoral care. One point to take further, however, might be the question of whether secular clergy owned or used non-liturgical books. As Hugh Thomas has recently reminded us, better-off members of the English clergy in the twelfth century owned and used a wide variety of books. Could individual clerics or secular minsters in pre-Conquest England perhaps have owned or written books that were not of immediate practical use to them?