The reform period of the eleventh-century Latin Church ran long and deep enough to create a sizeable wake. Its daunting agenda, which included wresting church properties and persons from secular power and fostering a celibate clergy, would require numerous iterations in church legislation ranging from ecumenical councils to national synods and then down to diocesan statutes by pastorally-minded bishops intent on carrying out reforms where they most counted, at the parish level. William Campbell sets out to chart this long journey of reform in thirteenth-century England.

Campbell aims to achieve this in three main sections: part 1 offers context with a broad-based view of the many and varied institutions involved in medieval pastoral care. While Lateran IV (1215) is often credited as the engine for much of the pastoral reform of the century, Campbell rightly begins his study earlier, in the theologically creative period between Lateran III (1179) and its successor council. From there, he looks to the ministers of pastoral care, primarily the parish clergy but also monks and canons regular—and of central importance to this study—the preaching and teaching work of the friars.

Part 2 showcases the textual revolution of the period in the manuals of pastoral instruction written mainly by university-educated Dominicans and Franciscans. If the theology of great universities like Paris and Oxford was out of reach for most medieval clergy, then the practical and pastoral work of preaching and catechesis was supported through an entire library of what Leonard Boyle called the “raft of pocketbooks” after the heavier and less accessible tomes of university theologians. Campbell recognizes a debt to Boyle and his students but deepens the appreciation of how this pastoral literature actually aided in the transformation of later medieval church life. Through Campbell's deft analysis, we gain real insights into the preaching and sacramental contents of these manuals, but also how a local curate armed with such a vademecum might have put it to use in practicing the “art of arts.”

Not content with leaving all of this in the realm of theory, Campbell devotes the third and final part of his book searching the pastoral turf of three medieval English dioceses: Lincoln, Exeter, and Carlisle. Two main things are accomplished here: the first is to see how these three dioceses met their pastoral obligations individually and in comparison with each other. Campbell's view is both detailed and comprehensive; he takes into consideration how landscape itself played a role in pastoral provision, but also the shaping influences of population, urban centers, cathedral life, types of clergy (secular and religious), and their educational opportunities and the local economies that had to carry it all. That dioceses differed, sometimes markedly, in pastoral provision is the second main offering here; generalizations about medieval pastoral care simply do not measure up.

Since it's Campbell's aim to chart out thirteenth-century church reform, much of the book, by dint of available sources, is both institutionally top-down and textual. There are many laws here. But this is the nature of the bulk of sources available to historians of the English thirteenth century and Campbell works them well: episcopal acta, provincial and diocesan legislation, the rare thirteenth-century bishop's register, and, rarer still, the kind of local sources that could describe pastoral care on the receiving end, so to speak—church visitations and manorial court records. The latter are here when they can be, and Campbell analyzes them ably with a view to how pastoral reforms might have been actualized. We get closest to this with the early pastoral manuals and their possible impact on changing parish life. Certainly, pastors who learned from those manuals might have preached better or heard confessions more ably. But, as with pastoral injunctions from on high, we often need to take the manuals (and Campbell) at their word. For instance, would the sexual anxieties expressed by a mendicant author writing about shriving female parishioners always or often be shared by a curate likely to know his congregation so well?

Campbell has examined an impressive array of thirteenth-century sources, manuscript and printed, and in his delving uncovers some stunning gems. But too often he brings one into the light only to set it aside. To be fair, he's clear on the limits of what one book on this wide-ranging subject can do. But a comment or two on the implications of some discovery would have been welcomed by this reader. For instance, in his examination of the Exeter diocese, we learn how its reform-minded bishop, Peter Quinel (d. 1291), chose to ignore a pastoral injunction from Archbishop John Pecham forbidding the laity to receive communion from the chalice, evidently, a long-held custom in Exeter. Not only does this speak to an important degree of episcopal autonomy not to mention the weight of local custom, but it also shows an interesting disparity between what a Provincial Council had determined and what, at least in this case, had not quite made its way into the naves of Exeter parish churches. If nothing else, this example reinforces those local variants in pastoral practice that Campbell keeps us attuned to, ones that belied the dreams of uniformity that often reverberate in the law.

This is an impressive book which should become its own vademecum for students of this subject. But it's also an expensive one whose occasional lapses in form, typographical errors, and errant phraseology threaten to mar its value.