The proctors or agents who represented the interests of their clients at the papal court acted as a vital link between the papacy, on the one hand, and the petitioners, litigants and others who had business at the curia, on the other. By employing a proctor, the client often avoided the need to travel to the curia. Even someone who was present there in person might be well advised to use the services of a proctor who was experienced in the procedures and circumstances of the curia. There has been something of a revival of interest in recent years in proctors, and especially those at the papal court in Avignon in the fourteenth century, notably a series of articles by Barbara Bombi and her edition of the register of Andrea Sapiti, proctor to the king of England and other clients (Il registro di Andrea Sapiti procuratore alla curia avignonese, Rome 2007).

Proctors may be distinguished according to the different departments of the papal administration in which they functioned (the chancery, the penitentiary, the Rota and other tribunals, and the chamber), which is not to say that they tended to specialise in only one department. Pierre-Marie Berthe provides an admirable summary of the proctors' functions (p. 58), and in chapters ii–v of part i he enlarges on their areas of activity. The heart of the book (parts ii–iii) is a study of the proctors who were employed by French clients at Avignon. Berthe is not here concerned with every known proctor, rather with those for whom a regular and sustained activity is evident, in other words the more or less professional proctors. He carefully defines the criteria for selection (see pp. 177–82), which result in a corpus of 131 proctors. The author considers every aspect of the lives of these men – the duration of proctorial activity and their subsequent careers, their clientèle and collaboration with other proctors, their geographical origin and clerical status, their academic, intellectual and professional formation (including the public notariate), their membership of the household of a cardinal, the curial offices that they held, and the ecclesiastical benefices that they acquired. There are seven appendices. The first of these lists instances of proctorial activity, the second records the duration of proctorial careers, the third the proctors' clients, while the fourth concerns regional groupings of proctors. The fifth appendix is much the most substantial (pp. 495–787) and contains a prosopographical repertory of the proctors. Appendix vi lists the proctors' monastic and episcopal clients.

This book, by a pupil of Bernard Barbiche, is based on the author's dissertation at the École des Chartes and his doctoral dissertation (Paris IV–Sorbonne). It is the most comprehensive treatment of its subject for any country and for any period, while offering interesting comparisons on the basis of published work concerning proctors for English and German clients. The author's archival research, notably in the Vatican Archives, has been thorough, and his knowledge of the scattered secondary literature appears to be remarkably comprehensive. It is not a criticism of his work to say that he has not found a body of more informal correspondence which would have helped to bring to life the somewhat murky world of proctors – correspondence of the type published by R. N. Salomon in Rat und Domkapitel von Hamburg um die Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts, I: Die Korrespondenz zwischen dem Hamburger Rat und seinen Vertretern an der päpstlichen Kurie in Avignon 1337 bis 1359 (Hamburg 1968). Berthe presents the results of his researches in clear prose. He has a penchant for statistics, some of them more enlightening than others, which are expressed in numerous tables, graphs and maps (the latter assembled in appendix vii).

There are a few minor slips. Thus, the data communis is incorrectly associated with the dating of papal letters (p. 101), letters of the cardinal penitentiary were composed on the basis of the petitions, not drafts (cf. p. 144), and the university of the papal curia was more than a studium of theology (cf. p. 353). It seems to me that at least one aspect of the theme would merit fuller treatment, that is, the activity of proctors in the audientia publica and audientia litterarum contradictarum. Letters of justice and certain other types of letters were read out in the audientia publica, giving the opportunity to a proctor to object to the issue of a letter, or to ‘contradict’ it. A hearing then followed, known as the audientia litterarum contradictarum. Some endorsements on original papal letters reflect the process. Although such annotations become rarer in the fourteenth century, they are still of interest. Thus, a letter of 15 May 1325, obtained by Iohannes de Bozeto, proctor of Hugo de Fulhivis, canon of Sainte-Opportune, Paris, concerning a dispute with the chapter of the same church is endorsed to show that a copy of the letter was made for the proctor of the opposing party, Aubertus de Guignicurte ii (B. Barbiche, Les Actes pontificaux originaux des Archives nationales de Paris, iii, Vatican City 1982, no. 2696). In the case of a letter of 13 December 1350, obtained by Petrus de Aquila for the abbey of Saint-Victor, Paris (ibid. no. 2938), it was the same Aubertus who objected to the letter's issue. Here, however, he was another proctor of the beneficiary, and the sealed letter was delivered to him so that he could retain it until Saint-Victor paid him his fee (see the endorsement, ‘pro salario’). These observations are intended not to detract from Berthe's achievement but rather to suggest that, even with the publication of his impressive and massive book, there are features of the proctors' work which would repay further investigation.