The twelfth century has long been recognized as a watershed period in the making of modern Europe. In the last few decades, however, historians have moved the chronological markers to include with it the second half of the eleventh and the first couple decades of the thirteenth. For church historians, this “long twelfth century” makes sense especially along the lines of religious reform, embracing the investiture struggle and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). In this welcome study Hugh Thomas makes an important contribution to the role played by secular clerics in this transformative age. His focus is England and his intention is a prosopographical study of the secular clergy. This allows Thomas to better assess their influence as a group, not just on English church life but on the broader intellectual and cultural legacies of the long twelfth century. His study is animated by three objectives. First, he aims to steady a long imbalance in medieval historiography and finally give the secular clergy their due, but he has to demonstrate their importance to the twelfth century and that's his second objective. Third, Thomas devotes many pages to the struggles secular clergy must have faced caught between unavoidable participation in worldly affairs (the secular part of their condition) and the traditional Christian contemptus mundi constantly preached by religious reformers.

Thomas dedicates fifteen chapters to his multifaceted explorations within four broad sections: how the secular clergy were expected to behave, their conflicted place in the world, their cultural and intellectual contributions, and, finally, their religious and pastoral lives. The range of subjects dealt with in these sections is impressive. We have the expected discussions on criminous clerks in the age of Becket, reforms and realities concerning clerical celibacy, scholars and their new schools, and creative and enervating tensions between secular priests and their monastic counterparts. In addition, the reader finds newer material or standard topics achieving a new depth: the disposition of priests’ wives and children, clerics as patrons but also participants in the arts, priestly bonds of friendship, persistence in clerical concubinage, priests as bibliophiles, and secular clergy in same-sex relationships. Eight brilliantly reproduced color plates display manuscript folios from codices largely in the collections of priests. These include a motet on the Assumption by Ralph Niger and a page from the sumptuous bible of Nicholas, Archdeacon of Huntingdon. Thomas illuminates these discussions with an impressive array of manuscript, edited, and secondary sources.

As rich as these sources are—theological, literary, canonical—they end up shining a somewhat angular light on Thomas's subject. Throughout the book, he often recognizes that the secular clergy of the long twelfth century have been neglected by other historians. At the same time, given the nature of available sources, Thomas makes the critical decision to limit his study to the secular clerical elite, and not only that, but to priests, leaving aside the many different kinds of clerics in various ranks of orders who made up the clerical population. Thomas's clergy are those few men who wrote and were written about by contemporaries. And so we learn a great deal about high-ranking secular priests, often well born and well beneficed, cathedral canons, prebendaries, university masters, and members of episcopal administrative households. While the focus is there and the prosopographical study is successful, Thomas is tempted to base conclusions for the much larger clerical proletariat on a thorough description of the relatively few. As a result, some crucial things are missed like the remarkable (and to reformers, frustrating) variety of secular clergy of the long twelfth century and for the rest of the medieval period. Secular priests like Peter of Blois, Gervase of Canterbury, and Gerald of Wales, who land often on the pages of this book, had far more in common with each other and their more worldly social peers, knights, landowners and minor nobles, than they did with the vast majority of secular clergy who exerted a steady influence, for good or ill, on the parishioners of medieval England. In truth, the secular clergy existed more as a group in canon law than they did in shared background, patronage, aptitude, training, income, and pastoral zeal.

Furthermore, with the focus nearly completely on priests, we miss the fact that these men had to start somewhere, even canonically. Preparation for priesthood and readiness for pastoral care were chronic challenges in the long twelfth century and beyond. The educational opportunities of the clerical elites in this study were not typical. Neither was the inevitable pastoral bungler in the hinterlands who has become a medieval priestly stereotype. Reformers were aware of the fact that some priest-candidates were more interested in income than Latinity, but they also knew, especially in the twelfth century, that there were precious few opportunities for anything approaching uniformity in priestly training. But the reach toward this was present in the reform incentives of the age. The third (1179) and fourth Lateran councils, not considered in this study as they should be, set up and reinforced the need for grammar and theology masters in every cathedral and other large churches. That the creation of these schools and the masters to go with them had any real or widespread effect on priestly training is a question that Thomas rightly raises. But the theological intention and the educational absence reflected in it need to be better explored. Both councils clarified the pastoral identity and duties of the bishop and, by extension, the secular clergy at work in parish churches. The Fourth Lateran Council further underscored the relationship between penitents and their parish priest as primary in the annual duty of confession. With the focus of this study so clearly on the secular priestly elite, much is accomplished, but, in the spirit of Thomas's conclusion, more on this subject still needs to be done.