Julia Barrow has spent decades doing the difficult, highly technical work of medieval ecclesiastical history—editing acta, retracing itineraries, working out the prosopographical details on a variety of clergy, and so on—and thus she is the ideal scholar to have produced this impressive synthesis about secular clerical careers in the central Middle Ages. As Barrow notes on the opening page of her introductory chapter, the meager scholarly attention given to secular clerics as a social group has been out of all proportion to their importance in medieval society. Perhaps because many of our essential sources come from clerical hands, we take the secular clergy's importance for granted; here, Barrow asks us, as scholars, to stop to think about crucial, but overlooked, aspects of their careers like the rituals that made them clergy and the precise nature of the tonsure they sported when they sat down to compose those sources. The result is an engaging and comprehensive survey that will become foundational for our understanding of the medieval Church.
The book's chronological boundaries were not chosen arbitrarily. As Barrow explains, many of the structures that shaped medieval clerical life can be traced to the early ninth century, when ecclesiastical leaders sought to regularize ordination and clerical grades, and aristocratic families developed new strategies for placing their sons in church careers. Explaining her study's end date, she notes that the early thirteenth century, as is clear from the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), “marks the end of a period of development in ecclesiastical administration” (7). Geographically, Barrow focuses on England, Northern France, and the Holy Roman Empire. This reflects the state of available sources for Italy, as well as the fact that institutional trends, especially those relating to cathedral clergy, took different directions in Italy and Southern France.
Throughout the work, Barrow carefully explores three defining attributes of clergy: their ordination, their tonsure, and their education. Another defining attribute, male-ness, is approached through discussions of changing attitudes toward celibacy and clerics’ roles within their families. The second chapter helpfully describes the history of the seven clerical grades and their conflation, at least for practical purposes, into four by the eleventh century: the junior grade of acolyte, the “normal grade for a young, trainee cleric,” and the higher grades of subdeacon, deacon, and priest (45). The stages of ordination gradually lost importance in marking out a clerical career until, by the twelfth century (especially in France and England), education became a more important indicator of one's professional progress. Barrow illustrates these developments with seventeen brief “examples of careers,” including those of Wulfstan, Alcuin, and Pope Leo IX (53–64).
Because seculars have been often compared with monks, and tend to suffer by the comparison, Barrow turns her attention in chapter 3 to the relationship between the two groups and sees the influence of the former in the construction of Carolingian-era prescriptive texts like the Rule of Chrodegang and Rule of Aachen, as well as the later Rule of Augustine. These developments created an institutional framework for seculars that allowed them a sense of identity independent from that of the regulars. Having established the sacramental and institutional bases for clerical identity, Barrow outlines the familial context of clerical careers, particularly uncle-nephew and father-son succession paradigms, arguing that by 1100 the former predominated in most of Europe. Here, the clergy appear in their role as conveyors of family wealth and influence, embedded in complex dynamics that included aunts, mothers, and sisters. Chapters 5 through 7 examine the social and intellectual formation of clerics, beginning with an original and illuminating chapter on the fostering of boys in ecclesiastical households and, in the later period, by cathedral canons. Barrow enters more familiar historiographical territory when she turns to clerical education. Since she is interested in the schools not as institutions but for how they helped define clerical careers, even scholars deeply familiar with the early history of the universities will find a fresh perspective here: the schools are considered in relation to family strategies for advancing their sons in the sorts of careers described earlier in the book. By the end of the twelfth century, at least in France and England, the schools had unlocked a new sort of social mobility.
The last three chapters explore the institutional contexts within which clergy worked and sought advancement: household service in royal, secular, and ecclesiastical courts; cathedral and collegiate churches (including one of the clearest explanations of how prebends work that the present reviewer has ever read); and local churches. As in earlier chapters, Barrow does an excellent job focusing on personal relationships, especially patronage relationships, and how they shaped careers. In the case of the parish clergy, a class barrier separated them from their collegiate church counterparts, especially in Germany.
Although one could certainly read this work as a descriptive survey, Barrow makes several intriguing arguments both explicit and implicit. What is most refreshing is her insistence that the history of the clergy is, at heart, a social history, and in this regard, her frequent presentation of secular clerics as family men is most salutary. Within her chosen geographic area, she is able to draw important regional contrasts to show how clerical options depended on local political and social arrangements. Because her primary concern is with clerical career experience, Barrow spends little time on the cultural impact of the clergy; at least for England, a good survey of the attendant issues can be found in Hugh Thomas's The Secular Clergy in England, 1066–1216 (Oxford University Press, 2014). This would be a wonderful book to assign to graduate teaching assistants, since it would provide them with a working knowledge of how the clergy who populate textbooks and lectures made their way in the medieval world. Indeed, it should become compulsory reading for church historians.
